Color-Code, LInk Footnotes or Comments to Text

[lxloco]

Version: 2004
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: Intel

I am annotating a statute. The language of the statute provides the elements for the cause of action, e.g. Murder is the beating, to death, of another human being, while that human being is eating a taco.

Courts have interpreted the words (elements) to mean certain things. "Murder" means X; "Human being" means Y; "Taco" means something akin but not exactly like a burrito.

I would like to change the font color of the elements. Red for murder; green for human being; yellow for taco. Then, I would like to add/append either a footnote or comment to each of those elements. I would like the footnote or comment to be the same color as the element being referenced. Thus, the link between the element and its footnote is more readily apparent.

I have not been able to find a way to do this automatically. This is a long statute and my notes are extensive. Must I do this one word/element at a time?

Insights are appreciated.

Lex

 

[John McGhie]

My first suggestion would be to thoroughly investigate the Find/Replace
mechanism. That is extremely powerful if you utilise the wild-card and
regular expression capabilities to recognise and replace text strings.
Start by reading up about it in the Help.

You can Find the string and replace it with the same string formatted with a
colour.

Then I would investigate the use of Styles. A style is a "collection of
formatting to which you have assigned a name." Again, look first in the
Help, then come back here and we can tell you how to use them.

You could create a style for each different kind of "thing" you want to
refer to, and set each style to the colour you want for that kind of thing.

Then if you want to do more than "colour" the text, you might investigate
AutoText, Bookmarks, and Cross-references.

These mechanisms give you the ability to store a string of text once and
re-use it lots of times. AutoText would allow you to store the word
"Murder" and its colour already formatted, so every time you inserted it it
came in in the correct colour.

Footnotes are not easy to colour, because they all use the same style. You
have to format them manually if you want coloured footnotes.

Hope this helps

Version: 2004
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: Intel

I am annotating a statute. The language of the statute provides the elements
for the cause of action, e.g. Murder is the beating, to death, of another
human being, while that human being is eating a taco.

Courts have interpreted the words (elements) to mean certain things. "Murder"
means X; "Human being" means Y; "Taco" means something akin but not exactly
like a burrito.

I would like to change the font color of the elements. Red for murder; green
for human being; yellow for taco. Then, I would like to add/append either a
footnote or comment to each of those elements. I would like the footnote or
comment to be the same color as the element being referenced. Thus, the link
between the element and its footnote is more readily apparent.

I have not been able to find a way to do this automatically. This is a long
statute and my notes are extensive. Must I do this one word/element at a time?

Insights are appreciated.

Lex

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Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[lxloco]

Thank you, John, for your thoughtful reply. While your answer is not the answer I am looking for, that speaks to the technology, and not to your answer.

Thank you again. Your generosity is appreciated.

Yours,
Lex