Using custom text in a referenced page number

[automandc]

Here is what I am trying to do (Word 2003):

I have two discrete parts of my document (could even be separate documents)
with multiple sections in each part.

I want to refer to the first part by a custom label, e.g. "MFND", and I want
that to be part of the page number so that, not only does "MFND-1, MFND-2"
appear at the bottom of each page, but in a TOC and TOA later in the document
(i.e., later section), page references identify "MFND-x" for the specific
location of the referenced item in Part 1, and regular page numbers for items
in Part 2.

This may not be possible, but if anyone can figure it out, I am betting it
is the denizens of this group.

TIA

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Whatever Your Name Is...

You're right: It's not possible Now, here's one way you can fudge it:
use a fake chapter number.

You need to assign a number to the chapter that will not occur as a "real"
chapter number. You can then use global Find/Replace to replace it with
your own string laster as part of your finishing process before printing.

I am sure you are already aware that this kind of page numbering makes for a
book that is extremely difficult to use? You must have some other important
business reason for choosing to design your document this way. However, for
those newer users who do not know why this is a method we normally avoid, I
will include the following:

Folio-by-chapter means the users have to "know" where each chapter starts
and ends in the book before they can work out how far down the page number
is likely to be. Unless you include coloured dividers at the beginning of
each chapter, it's very difficult for them to know that.

"How many thumb-fuls from the front is page "MFND-27"?" So looking anything
up in such a book becomes a chore, and thus, users *don't*. Which sorta
defeats the purpose a bit And the extra cost of adding the dividers,
and then implementing a system to track people to enssure page replacement
is really happening, far exceeds the cost of printing a new manual each time
you update.

Companies often specify this kind of page numbering because they believe it
will be cheaper to maintain the document by "page replacement". The people
who make such decisions have never been taken on a tour of the operational
areas of the company, where they will find the sad little piles of
"replacement pages" languishing folornly for years beneath the bookshelf
waiting for "someone" with sufficient "time" to insert them in the books.
The actual "information" being used day-to-day is years out of date!

Sometimes, it is because they have not Googled for the Victorian Esso Gas
Disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Esso_Longford_gas_explosion, and
learned just how expensive the legal settlements can get after their
oil-refinery blows up -- the operator struggling to respond to an emergency
was working with manuals that were years out of date because the replacement
pages never DID get inserted. Until after he lost control of the plant,
turning a routine "incident" into a catastrophe that cost lives and nearly
took out an entire suburb

(It's really interesting how the legal mind works: nowhere in that report is
it mentioned that while the tank rupture was always going to happen, the
situation could have been recovered quite quickly had the operator's manual
not been out of date!!)

Cheers

--

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs

+61 4 1209 1410, <mailto:[email protected]> mailto:[email protected]

 

[automandc]

Name is Tobias...

Thanks. Can you elaborate a bit on "use a fake chapter number"?
Specifically, how do I create a chapter "number" out of something arbitrary
like "MFND"?

The purpose is thus: I am an attorney, and the document is a brief (a
summary judgment brief for those who care). Under the rules for this type of
brief, it is necessary to put your version of the "facts" -- referred to in
my case as the "Statement of Material Facts Not In Dispute", hence "MFND" --
in either a separate document, or at least a discrete section of the brief.
I had it as a discrete section, but now the court I am in has amended its
local rule to require that it be a separate document altogether.

However, I would like to include references in the MFND in my Table of
Authorities. Without any qualifier, the TOA would show, e.g., a cite
appearing on page 12 then page 4, or even on 2 page "4s" -- thus, I want to
distinguish those instances that appear in the MFND from those that are in
the main portion of the brief. (The frontpiece of my brief, containing the
TOA and TOC is already numbered i, ii, iii, ... )

I kept the MFND in the same document for simplicity -- simply moving it to
its own section at the beginning (two sections, actually, if you count the
title page), but it could also be in a separate document.

The only thing I can think of is to run a separate TOA for the MFND and then
manually modify the real TOA. Since there aren't that many cites in the MFND
it won't be that difficult, but my goal was to automate as much of this
document as possible.

Thanks for the response. I agree and understand on the folio-pagination
issue. It is still common with some legal services (i.e., research volumes
that are updated regularly to reflect legal developments). For some of these
services, such as Moore's Federal Practice, folio-paging really is the better
way to go. It allows them to send out very regular updates (monthly in some
instances) to thousands of subscribers. The services are kept in binders
typically in law libraries (private firm or institutional), and there is
usually a dedicated person responsible for tracking and inserting the
looseleaf updates.

The other manner of legal updates -- supplements -- have their own issues.
For example, the Wright & Miller series (another very common legal reference)
is a 40+ volume set. Every year they issue a supplement for virtually every
volume. Each supplement is cumulative until they come out with a new edition
(every 10 years or so). The supplements are done as "pocket parts" that get
stuck in the back of the volume until they become too large, at which point
they are their own soft-cover volume. Thus, not only do the supplements take
up a lot of shelf space, but when referring to a section you must also
remember to refer to the supplements (which are printed on newsprint quality
paper, making them hard to copy and hard to read). It is very frustrating.
The supplements contain only the added text and (more commonly) the new cites
added to the individual footnotes, so they are not usable by themselves.
Once you find the right source in the main volume, you have to go find the
corresponding section/footnote in the supp. The supplements contain
everything from just new supporting references to outright reversals in
previous rules -- so you ignore them at your peril. However, there is no
indication in the main volume whether the supplement actually contains
anything at all relevant to your point (and since some sections can have 100
or more footnotes, slogging through the supplement to find if your specific
footnote was updated is a chore, plus when the add new sections and footnotes
you wind up with .1, .2 numbering).

The only other method, used by, e.g., the Code of Federal Regulations (put
out by the Gov't printing office), is to replace the entire series (in CFR
that's approx. 100 volumes) every year to reflect the cumulative update.
Thompson West (the biggest legal publisher) does this with the standard
reference rule books we use once and sometimes twice a year. I collect the
slightly out-of-date ones to donate to a prison library program, and every
year just the office I work in (approx. 280 lawyers) generates well over 10
boxes worth of books that would otherwise be dumped in the trash, even though
95% of the information is still current. So that isn't very efficient either.

Short of using electronic research (very expensive), there is no good way to
do these things, but in legal research folio-pagination is not an entirely
bad method.

Thanks again, and thanks for the interesting discussion.

Tobias

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Tobias:

OK, There's really no good way to do this in Word.

What you have to do is edit the List Template for the numbering style, then
apply that.

Then you disable "Include chapter number with page number" and add a
cross-reference to your footer to just the "Paragraph Number" of the Heading
concerned.

I'm struggling here because I'm looking at Word 2007.

1) Apply a Style to the first paragraph in the MFND section. This must be
a style of type Paragraph and needs to be anything EXCEPT one of the
"Heading" series of built in styles. Let's call it StartStyle

2) Use Format>Styles and Formatting>... drop down the little arrow and
choose MODIFY on the StartStyle

3) Choose to modify Numbering

4) Get into the Customise dialog for Level 1

5) Where you see the counter for the heading number, delete it and type
"MFND". OK your way out. Now we have a "heading" that is "numbered" MFND
and it is applied to some text.

6) Now add a section break before and after your MFND section.

7) Go to Insert>Page numbers>Format... Set "Continue from previous section"
to OFF, and REMOVE the "Include chapter number". We're going to put that in
another way.

8) Get into the footer and go to View>Header and Footer>Footer and turn
"Same as Previous" to OFF in both this section, and also do it to the
following section.

8) Now get into your Footer and Insert>Page number. Just the page number:
no text!!

9) Click before the page number and type a hyphen or whatever you want to
use as a separator

10) Click before the hyphen and choose Insert>Index and Tables>Cross
Reference. Choose the paragraph that shows as being "numbered" MFND, and
choose to reference the "Paragraph number only". OK your way out. Now you
have your page numbers all showing as "MFND-1", "MFND-2" etc.

11) Now generate your Table of Authorities as normal. You may wish to
create a category of MFND and mark each of your citations with the category
MFND. You still won't get "MFND" as part of your page number, but at least
you will get a category heading for MFND and the page numbers below it will
apply only to that section.

The limitation we're up against here is that Word's Folio by Chapter
mechanism is designed only to return an Integer for the Chapter Number, and
due to a bug, it becomes very unstable if that integer goes above two
digits.

Normally we would handle this by saying "All the MFND are in Section 6" then
using ordinary Folio by Chapter. Or we would assemble a manual Table of
Contents and TOA using manual cross-references.

No good way to do it (that I can find...)

Hope this helps


--

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs

+61 4 1209 1410, <mailto:[email protected]> mailto:[email protected]

 

[automandc]

Thanks, this is helpful. One question, though. If I apply the "StartStyle"
to the first paragraph in the section, it will have "MFND" added to it by the
autonumbering, which won't make sense.

This is mostly academic at this point, as I decided to move the MFND to
another document and just do the TOA manually (there aren't that many cites
in the MFND), but I like the challenge of bending Word to my will.

I haven't tried folio numbering in Word -- I was just addressing its use
generally. I think a lot of people (myself included) tend to forget that
Word is a word processor, and not really a page layout program. It does a
pretty good job of page layout, so for 99% of people it is sufficient -- but
for professional prepress it is still no substitute for a professional page
layout program (which I don't use).

I will say that these discussion boards (and the people who respond to them)
are an invaluable resource that any serious user of Word should know about.
I really appreciate your taking the time to help.

Cheers.
Tobias

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Tobias:

Yes, sorry, I forgot: There is nothing to prevent you setting the FONT
property of that "StartStyle" to "Hidden". If you do, it will be in the
document but invisible and it won't print.

There are other ways you can do this, using a Custom Document Property (or
even, an ordinary Document Property).

Like I said: "None" of them provide good support for what you want to do.
None of them are really suitable for use in a document that is to be used by
other users: they won't understand the special techniques used and they will
stuff it up.

This is a philosophical problem that has occurred because it is now "easy"
to produced text, compared to how it was 50 or 100 years ago. The amount of
"information" being produced is roughly following Moore's Law And you
Lawyers are the worst

"Document Management" is a busy field these days, fertile with fees for
consultants! All manner of strategies are in use to try to handle the
bloat. The one I prefer to recommend first is "Soft Copy" -- expressing the
information in XML so it can be easily and instantly updated without having
to worry about who has a copy.

Cheers

--

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs

+61 4 1209 1410, <mailto:[email protected]> mailto:[email protected]