Redefine Normal style

[AstroGuy]

Hey, as a veteran of Usenet, that was a running battle then, too! People would add 1 sentence and not delete the quoted text which could then end up taking up screens and screens-- and make it hard to find the next post! Same prob here!

Yeah, my retyping from memory of my prior post specified that it was Redefine Style by Example for Normal that had been dropped. As indicated, I know I can change it because I do! Redefine by Example was buried in the old days-- not on the toolbar and, even I believe, IIRC, not on the menus either! You had to add it, which means that the rationale (unintended ripple effects) really doesn't work that well! (Plus, unintended ripple effects happen whenever novice users use styles!!) The automatic adjustment issue is a different one-- that is dangerous terrain for a novice!

You mentioned the ragged top margin problem--that's another thing I omitted in my reposting that I had wondered about. In my experience with Word, it's never been a problem, even with my Normal paragraphs having 12 point *above* them--and even with my headings having 18 or 24 points!

Word has been smart enough to adjust them so that they fall flush with the top of the page. It omits the space! I always check that with Print Preview...and am amazed at how easy it is to spot (I usually end up finding some heading that I hadn't defined properly). in fact, I just went and double-checked several documents of mine and the top margins on facing pages are identical, even with 12 points BEFORE!

Maybe they fixed this as some point and you're still whistling to keep away the elephants!

OTOH, you likely deal with a greater variety of documents and users and have seen the idiosyncrasies as you mentioned in Word's handling of top paragraphs.

Appreciate the intelligent and even-tempered responses! And that, given my Usenet experience, is a welcome contrast!

 

[John McGhie]

Word has been smart enough to adjust them so that they fall flush with the top
of the page. It omits the space! I always check that with Print Preview...and
am amazed at how easy it is to spot (I usually end up finding some heading
that I hadn't defined properly). in fact, I just went and double-checked
several documents of mine and the top margins on facing pages are identical,
even with 12 points BEFORE!

Maybe they fixed this as some point and you're still whistling to keep away
the elephants!

Believe it or not, it was never broken The algorithm has worked
successfully and correctly since Word 5/6.

But you have to know how it works OR format your documents correctly

I suspect you are formatting your documents without sprinkled hard page
breaks to control the pagination. If you do that, Word will paginate the
document automatically and suppress the space above every time.

Sadly, the people who know least about Word are the ones who are most likely
to be manually intervening in their pagination, and thus the ones most
likely to have this problem.

The algorithm basically says "If WORD causes the paragraph to move to the
top of the next page, it will suppress the space above it. If the USER
causes the paragraph to move (with a hard page break or a section break or
whatever) then Word will print the space above."

But if you use "Keep With Next" to prevent Word separating paragraphs, it
then has to move the paragraph and in doing so it will correctly suppress
the space

And yes, potty-mouths and trolls and all the other sad primordial pond-scum
from UseNet are deprived of oxygen in here ‹ at the risk of being described
as curmudgeonly old farts (which some of us are...) we like it that way. I
am the one most likely to transgress

Cheers


This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[dow]

If the USER causes the paragraph to move (with a hard page break or a section break or whatever) then Word will print the space above."

Am I right in interpreting this as meaning I SHOULDN'T be using hard
page breaks or section breaks to start a new page? If so, how do I get
a new page??!

 

[CyberTaz]

John & I are in complete harmony re forced page breaks (Cmd+return) as
something to be avoided but I'm not nearly as adamant as he about Next Page
Section Breaks... Although I defer to his experience

The preferred method is to use the Paragraph formatting attribute of Page
Break Before -- preferably as an attribute of the Style applied to the
paragraph to appear at the top of the new page... usually a Heading style.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Clive Huggan]

Me too!

There are many things you can do to format Word so you don't have to go back
if you add text subsequently and so you can make major changes (e.g. change
the fonts used for body text and headings) very quickly.

Take a look at Appendix A: The main "minimum maintenance" features of my
documents, starting on page 164 of some notes on the way I use Word for the
Mac, titled "Bend Word to Your Will", which are available as a free download
from the Word MVPs' website
(http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Bend/BendWordToYourWill.html).

[Note: "Bend Word to your will" is designed to be used electronically and
most subjects are self-contained dictionary-style entries. If you decide to
read more widely than the item I've referred to, it's important to read the
front end of the document -- especially pages 3 and 5 -- so you can select
some Word settings that will allow you to use the document effectively.]

Note: In Word 2008, which I don't use yet, some of this information may be
accessible through a different interface. If that causes problems, post back
and someone will help you further.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the Americas and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
====================================================

 

[John McGhie]

Well, it's an excellent question.

Really, it's the beginning of a fairly long "Decision Tree". The first
decision is "Are you going to keep the document?"

For a document that you are going to type, print, and delete; anything that
looks right is right. The fastest way to get there is the best way. If the
thing won't paginate properly, whack in a couple of page breaks and let's
move on...

Next question is: "How is the document going to be used?"

For any kind of *ML output ‹ SGML, HTML, XML ‹ page and section breaks are
best used only for their intended purpose, and page breaks best not used at
all. In the markup languages, you have no idea how big the "paper" is, and
no control over the display size. So if you put in page breaks that are
correct on your screen, they will be wrong on mine.

The next question is: "How long is the document?"

For a tiny ten-page document, there is really no time-saving involved in
doing things the right way. Use whatever comes to mind. If you need to
update the document, you will probably have to move the hard page breaks and
section breaks etc, but it will only take you ten minutes max, so why worry
about it.

However, if you are creating a document longer than a thousand pages,
involving multiple authors and editors, with a view to keeping it maintained
for ten or 20 years, then "Yes, you should not use section breaks purely to
create a new page, and you should never use page breaks."

That's because any of these "hard" pagination methods all have to be
adjusted any time the text changes. If you or your co-workers have to go
from page 1 to page last on a 5,000-page volume just to put the page breaks
right, and you have to do that every three months, you will soon be looking
for more efficient methods.

These are perhaps the primary considerations: there are others, such as "Are
you serving the USA market?" The USA uses a strange imperial paper-size
that is not used anywhere else in the world, so if you have to serve the USA
you have to design the document so you can easily change the paper size

"Are you preparing 'finished' output, or are you going out to a typesetter?"
In professional publishing, pagination is normally handled by the graphics
designer, and page breaks will be stripped when they get the document,
whether you put them in or not. Section break either have no effect or
weird and unwanted effects in such machinery.

The methods I and Clive recommend cause you to create a document in such a
way that it goes right and stays right the first time, without any fiddling.
It's one thing less you have to do, in a world where time is always
insufficient and money is never enough.

Hope this helps

Am I right in interpreting this as meaning I SHOULDN'T be using hard
page breaks or section breaks to start a new page? If so, how do I get
a new page??!

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[AstroGuy]

Wonderfully put, John! There is a trade-off between quick-and-dirty to get the job down, and understanding and using Word's features with longer documents.

I've been surprised at how crudely Word is generally used... many, if not most of the students I work with, do NOT even use the ruler, let alone style sheets! They use tabs to indent paragraphs, and use forced line breaks to create hanging indents and bibliographies.

In one of my doctoral courses, I do a workshop on Word's ruler and style sheet--and ban the use of the tab and the forced line break, especially for quotes and bibliographies. They have to use the ruler and they need to learn how to do create and edit a style.

In one exercise they learn what a mess is created if they have to edit a biblio hanging indent entry that was created with tabs and forced line breaks. They quickly realize the advantage of a bibliography style. They're also amazed by Word's ability to sort paragraphs, to put a biblio in alphabetical order. (Such basics that we who enjoy word processors take for granted, most apparently do not use!)

Learning about styles is especially crucial for doctoral students given that they'll be writing 200-300 page theses. When they discover that the grad school or the style manual specifies different formats than they had thought were called for, their lives will be a lot easier if they've used styles to create and edit their document.

The classic case is quotes. Many do single spaced block quotes, indented on both sides (which is actually the way I prefer it), but APA style requires indentation on the left, not on the right, and double-spaced paragraphs-- quite different from how I and many others were taught. Better to change the definition of the quote style than have to manually change each block quote in a several hundred page document!

 

[John McGhie]

Oooohhhh yeahhhhh!!!

People who have never been there, don't understand the desperation a user
feels when faced with a long document that's going wrong, and a deadline
that determines the rest of their career, and that will occur at nine a.m.
(in four hours from 'now')!!

Back in the days before electronic delivery, I remember a team of six of us
working on a 450-page manual. The courier was sitting in the front office
waiting to take the printed copy to the airport, and we were raking chapters
out of the manual because the functions involved had not made it through
test, and had been disabled in the software to be delivered on the same
plane.

The courier said the drive to the airport would take 45 minutes. There was
only one plane a week to the customer. And if we didn't hit the deadline,
the company would not get paid six million dollars, and everyone on the
project was out of a job.

Can you imagine the collected faces of the other staff looking over the
partition while we worked? The boss's face was sheet-white. The Manager's
shirt had two clear dark patches under each arm, in an airconditioned
office...

We made it.

But the recommendations I make in here are formed by experiences like that,
during the past 40 years

Cheers

Wonderfully put, John! There is a trade-off between quick-and-dirty to get the
job down, and understanding and using Word's features with longer documents.

I've been surprised at how crudely Word is generally used... many, if not most
of the students I work with, do NOT even use the ruler, let alone style
sheets! They use tabs to indent paragraphs, and use forced line breaks to
create hanging indents and bibliographies.

In one of my doctoral courses, I do a workshop on Word's ruler and style
sheet--and ban the use of the tab and the forced line break, especially for
quotes and bibliographies. They have to use the ruler and they need to learn
how to do create and edit a style.

In one exercise they learn what a mess is created if they have to edit a
biblio hanging indent entry that was created with tabs and forced line breaks.
They quickly realize the advantage of a bibliography style. They're also
amazed by Word's ability to sort paragraphs, to put a biblio in alphabetical
order. (Such basics that we who enjoy word processors take for granted, most
apparently do not use!)

Learning about styles is especially crucial for doctoral students given that
they'll be writing 200-300 page theses. When they discover that the grad
school or the style manual specifies different formats than they had thought
were called for, their lives will be a lot easier if they've used styles to
create and edit their document.

The classic case is quotes. Many do single spaced block quotes, indented on
both sides (which is actually the way I prefer it), but APA style requires
indentation on the left, not on the right, and double-spaced paragraphs--
quite different from how I and many others were taught. Better to change the
definition of the quote style than have to manually change each block quote in
a several hundred page document!

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[John McGhie]

AstroGuy, why don't you send me a private email from a real email address?

There's something we might talk about...

Cheers

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[dow]

"Decision Tree" on Hard Page Breaks etc:

Thank you as ever, John, for a splendid treatise. I was worried that I
was a social pariah for using Hard Page Breaks. Given I'm never
producing magnum opuses, I can continue using them with (relative)
impunity...