Hi CritterSit,
I want to create a website of foreign-language short stories, that will
let nonnative readers see English word definitions and commentary by
moving their mouse over the foreign word. I'd like the definition, and
sometimes even extended commentary) to come up in a little box without
interfering with the on-screen word. Can anyone tell me how to do this
in Word for Mac? I'm saving each story as a webpage in Word and
eventually planning to import the Word doc into iWeb or another web
publishing software.
This sounds like a pretty cool project and I wish you luck with it.
You should know, however, that Word is not a very good tool for building
webpages. There's a number of things that you don't have control over, or
that are difficult to control. Also, it writes HTML in such a way that the
document can be reconverted to a Word document, which produces excessively
long and confusing HTML, and includes some personal information. I'm
thinking that iWeb, which gives you even less control and is really aimed at
pages with a lot of graphics, really doesn't sound suitable for this
presumably text-heavy project either.
Anyhow, possibilities. In Word itself, you could select a word, use Insert |
Hyperlink and add a custom ScreenTip to show the definition. (Put # in the
Anchor box to make it a link that goes nowhere.) Then hovering the mouse
over the word would show that screentip right over the word. When I saved
that page as .htm and opened it in Safari and Firefox, it worked exactly the
same way.
So that method would kinda work--however, MacWord 2004 has a bug that wipes
the custom screen tip if you then reopen the .htm webpage in Word. If you
ever needed to edit the story, you would have to recreate all the custom
screentips. You could get around that by doing the main composing in Word,
but doing further editing in a real webpage editor--or by not needing to
edit.
But you still have the problem that using screentips doesn't exactly meet
your criterion of non-interference anyhow. (Screentips equate to the "title"
attribute in HTML). I am fairly novice at webpages, but I suspect that using
anything other than the screentip/title solution would require investing a
least a little time and effort in learning how to build webpages and
understand the code that webpage editors produce. So you might decide to
settle for screentips.
My suggestion--and this may be time-consuming but would probably save you
major hassle later. Do up a couple of pages of one story as a test. Try the
method above from Word to web and see how you like the result. Since you are
planning to switch to a web publishing software eventually anyhow, you may
as well do it sooner rather than later. Experiment with different methods of
transferring that test page from Word into various webpage editors--most
offer 30-day trial versions. I have had good luck with simple copy and paste
from Word into a webpage editor. Some web editors might make it easier to
add the "title" attribute than it is to create a screentip in Word. Sort
out a workflow that works for you. Sort out a rough design for the look of
that test page. Upload your various test pages to the web and make sure they
work in different browsers on both the Mac and Windows. Then, before you
spend a lot of time converting the stories, you'll know that you have a
process that works.
