Tag Archives: styles

The 2021 CIEP conference: Using Word styles

This year’s CIEP conference was held online, from 12 to 14 September. Attendees from all over the world logged on to learn and socialise with their fellow editors and proofreaders, and a number of delegates kindly volunteered to write up the sessions for us. Abi Saffrey reviewed Using Word styles, presented by Jill French.

Stylish editing

This session allowed people who have not yet completed the CIEP’s Word for Practical Editing course to benefit from Jill French’s calm and clear approach to explaining something that many editors, let’s be honest, are a bit bamboozled by.

Microsoft Word is packed with tools and functions that many editors never use, but styles are incredibly useful even when a client (or manager) does not ask for them to be applied to a document.

Jill explained that a style is a pre-set combination of font features (size, bold) and paragraph attributes (spacing, indents). Existing styles can be applied or amended using the Style section of the ribbon at the top of the Word window, or by expanding that into the Style Pane (by clicking on the little arrow in the bottom-right corner). As well as applying styles to text, it is possible to add ‘direct formatting’ using the Font and Paragraph options on the ribbon. Direct formatting only affects that one occurrence of the text, whereas Styles can be modified to amend all occurrences throughout the document.

Jill walked us through elements of the Style Pane, including the very useful Style Inspector. The little icon with a magnifying glass gives all the style details of a selected character, word or paragraph. Jill then moved on to cover applying built-in styles, creating new styles and amending a style. As well as looking at the font elements of a style, she covered elements of paragraph formatting, including line spacing, indents (or not) and page breaks. The latter was one of my major takeaways from this session – it’s possible to add a line break to a style; so, for example, each chapter can start on a new page if you add a page break to the chapter heading style.

Jill briefly looked at how styles can help with reordering content. Via the navigation pane (on a PC found on the View ribbon), or by clicking Ctrl+F, it’s possible to see the sections of the document under ‘Headings’. Within that pane, it’s possible to drag one heading to above/below another, which reorders the text within the document – mind blown!

To share styles, it’s possible to share a document with the styles within it, or create a template document (filename.dot) that can be used as the basis for new documents or attached to existing documents.

Jill finished the session by highlighting how Word styles can save time, keep documents under control, and make them (and you) look professional.

The session was a very comprehensive introduction to Word styles, and demonstrated the importance of using this functionality in everyday editing life.


Learn more about working in Microsoft Word in the CIEP course Word for Practical Editing.


Abi Saffrey has been tinkering with Microsoft Word documents for over 20 years.

She’s an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP, offering editorial project management and copyediting to a variety of organisations that publish digital and printed content.

 

About the CIEP

The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) is a non-profit body promoting excellence in English language editing. We set and demonstrate editorial standards, and we are a community, training hub and support network for editorial professionals – the people who work to make text accurate, clear and fit for purpose.

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Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

A week in the life of a typesetter

By Andrew Chapman

I’ll have to begin with a disclaimer: a lot of each ‘week in my life’ is currently spent as a (very) amateur home-based teacher of my two children, something I’m sure many CIEP members in the middle years of life can relate to; so this blog post instead reflects some of the variety of my work. ‘Typesetting in times of change’, perhaps!

A flexible approach

It was luck that brought me to my slightly unusual career, mixing editorial and writing work with the design side of publishing. Early in my career, I got a job as a staff writer on a computer magazine – remember the Amstrad PCW word processors? That technology was already obsolescent in the mid-1990s, but in a sense this helped me out: the magazine had a small team, so learning fast on the job, and being able to pick up how to use QuarkXPress, was an asset. A later stint on a weekly newspaper, again requiring a flexible approach, cemented my combination of editing and typesetting skills, which has kept me fed as a freelancer for more than 20 years now.

I’d say the two things that have changed the most in that time have been the software and the route to publication, which are inevitably intertwined. Quark is often forgotten these days, as most publishers use Adobe InDesign – though actually I still prefer Quark myself, and its current version is a worthy competitor once again. In practice I use both most days – although editing work is still done in Word.

Changing technology

The advent of self-publishing has had a major influence on the technology – all routes for print lead to a press-ready PDF, but ebooks have very different constraints and attributes. The holy grail of publishing is a system which is flexible, easy to use and accommodates these very different forms of output from a single source file. Both Quark and InDesign can produce ebooks, but I find they are not always very good – it depends on the book. And now there are various solutions in the mix which can sometimes make all this a simpler business – I’m thinking of Vellum (a Mac-only program which is very clever, but limited in its typesetting features), Pressbooks and other tools created by marketplaces such as Reedsy and Amazon. A new player in the print-and-ebook space is Hederis – too pricey for my taste, but one to watch.

The point of this trip down software’s memory lane is really that one has to keep up with these trends, and expect to use a variety of tools for the job – the varied nature of books and magazines means that no single tool cracks every nut. But the one thing that is guaranteed to have any typesetter in tears is a file in Microsoft Publisher format!

Varied work

Much of my career has been spent in magazines, but over the last few years I have shifted the balance of my business to books – sadly magazines seem to be in serious decline, apart from a niche market for attractive indie magazines, often marketed online. Inevitably shop closures during the pandemic have accelerated the decline of the newsstand, although the more serious enemy really is the vast range of free content online. Thankfully, books seem to be thriving, and in the lockdown months I’ve noticed a lot of authors seem to be finishing their books and looking for help in getting them out.

Being an editor who typesets, or a typesetter who edits – my sense of which I am varies day to day – means I can often be involved through more of a book’s production, which I find very rewarding. I find the two activities occupy very different parts of my ‘headspace’, too: for editing, I have to be working in absolute silence, but I can work on paper or a laptop if need be; whereas for typesetting, I typically have Radio 4 burbling in the background – I have two large screens in front of me, and now can’t remember how I ever managed with one.

I love the variety of projects which freelancing enables me to take on – although the scheduling can of course be a headache, especially when books get delayed or all suddenly come in at once. One recent project which I enjoyed being involved with was a lockdown cookery book by a Michelin-starred chef, whose son grew the vegetables the chef cooked with – so it was an interesting mix of father-and-son bonding and mouth-watering recipes, accompanied by amazing photos by a professional food photographer.

I’m something of a generalist by nature – hence the two sides to my career, I suppose – so I also enjoy not knowing what’s next: my most recent editing projects have been a historical novel, a thesis about forensics in detective fiction and a book about understanding canine psychology; and on the design side there have been business books, a short story collection and a trio of books by an established author dipping her toe in the world of self-publishing for the first time.

If there’s one subject area I particularly enjoy, however, it’s history – I’ve been the editor of a family and social history magazine for the last decade, and these days I typeset it too (of course, sometimes budgetary constraints lurk behind these decisions). And in December, I launched a related side project of my own – a weekly email newsletter presenting first-hand accounts from history, partly because I feel history publishing needs more ‘ordinary’ voices from the past rather than just famous names and royalty. I’m not really sure why I’ve forced more constraints on my complicated week – but I suppose if there’s one thing my erratic career has shown, it’s that I like a challenge.

Working together

Maybe being an editor/typesetter combined is ultimately my real specialism – hopefully I’ve got enough years under the belt now to have some insight into how the two work best together, and I’ll try to suppress the lingering spectre of imposter syndrome that whispers ‘jack of all trades, master of none …’ in my ear.

From a typesetter’s point of view, perhaps a few words of advice might be of help to other editors and the authors they work with:

  • Please don’t embed images in your Word document – or, at least, only do so for reference. Word has a habit of chewing up image files, and in any case, the typesetting process, regardless of the software used, needs images as separate files. (This isn’t necessarily the editor’s responsibility, of course, but they should always be high resolution, ie at least 300dpi.)
  • It’s fine – and indeed helpful – to mark up a Word file with styles, for example for body text and different levels of headings, though try to avoid vast numbers of them; and don’t assume that what falls in a certain way in the Word file will end up looking quite the same in the typeset file.
  • Don’t bother ‘laying out’ a book in Word, with running headers and footers, indents or paragraph spacing, and so on: all this will be lost or changed anyway. When a Word file is imported into InDesign, say, the distinctions between styles can be preserved as well as formatting such as bold and italics, but most other things are likely to change. Ultimately the key thing is that the file distinguishes things semantically: the content is sacred, but the form will change.

Andrew Chapman is a Professional Member of the CIEP, as well as a member of the Publishers Association, the Alliance of Independent Authors, the Society of Authors and the Independent Publishers Guild. When not joining associations, he runs Prepare to Publish with the help of some fellow freelancers. His latest side project, the Histories newsletter, can be found at www.gethistories.com

 


Photo credits: letters by Amador Loureiro; spinach by Sigmund, both on Unsplash

Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

What’s e-new? The efficient guide to Word

By Andy Coulson

This issue of The Edit has a theme of working efficiently, so let’s take a look at how we can persuade every editor’s favourite tech tool to work efficiently.

1. Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are a great little time saver. Think about what you do when you use a mouse – you move it about to try to line up a pointer on a (small) target. You then click and, depending on what you want to do, perhaps repeat this two or more times to get to your command. But with a shortcut you press two or three keys together, and away you go. ‘How-To Geek’ has a really good list.

You don’t have to accept Microsoft’s default choices, either. If you go to Options > Customize Ribbon you’ll see an option at the bottom to customise keyboard shortcuts. This allows you to set up shortcuts for any commands. You can also allocate shortcuts to macros (see below).

2. Styles

Styles offer you a way to quickly format elements of the document. However, they can be a bit fiddly to use. In Word 365, the styles appear in the Home ribbon, as well as in the Quick Access Toolbar at the top. Often you’ll find you use the styles already in the document, and you simply apply them by putting your cursor in the block of text you want to style and then clicking the style name.

But, what do you do when a client says ‘make file A look like file B’? Word has a mechanism to copy styles between documents, but it’s well hidden. You can add the Developer tab to the ribbon, which you do by going into File > Options > Customize Ribbon and selecting ‘Developer’ from the list on the left. Make sure ‘Main Tabs’ is selected at the top of the list on the right and then click ‘Add’.

In the Developer tab, click on ‘Document Templates’, and then ‘Organizer’ in the ‘Templates’ tab of the pop-up box. You will see two lists. The one on the left should have the file name of your current document underneath. On the right-hand one, click ‘Close File’, and this will clear the list, then change to ‘Open File’. Click on it and select the template or document you want to import from. You can then simply select the styles you want and click the ‘Copy’ button to import these to your document.

3. Wildcards

If you use Find and Replace, learning to use wildcards will transform your searching. These allow you to look for patterns rather than specific words. For example, ‘?ed’ tells Word to find ‘ed’ preceded by any other single character, so it would find ‘red’, ‘bed’, ‘Red’ or ‘Bed’ and so on. This can get complicated, but it can also be a real time saver. One of my favourite applications is cleaning up question numbering in textbooks where I can’t use auto-numbering. Here, searching for ‘([0-9]{1,2})\)^s’ and replacing with ‘\1^t’ would change one- or two-digit numbering like this: ‘1.<space>’ to ‘1<tab>’.

There are an awful lot of options, and one place to find help on these is Jack Lyon’s Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, which is available as a PDF ebook. I have it open in my ebook reader most of the time I’m editing in Word. Geoff Hart’s Effective Onscreen Editing also has a chapter on making the most of Find and Replace.

4. Macros

Macros are short programs that build on the capabilities of Word. They often link together a number of functions within Word to achieve a more complex task, be that something which finds information about the document, changes what you have selected or makes global changes.

Many of you will be aware of Paul Beverley and his macros, and I can’t suggest a better way in to macros than Paul’s Macros by the tourist route. This is a really good introduction to using macros, and will lead you to Paul’s amazing macro library. Once you get into using these you can really start saving time on your work in Word.

Among my favourites are DocAlyse, which runs a range of tests on a document to flag the types of issues it may have; WhatChar, which identifies any character; SpellingErrorLister, which creates a list of potential spelling errors; and HyphenAlyse, which identifies the frequency of hyphenated words (and their non-hyphenated equivalents) and checks common prefixes.

The CIEP has also produced a fact sheet about getting started with macros.

5. Add-ins

Add-ins go a step further than macros. They are programs that work within Word to add more functions. Many of you will have heard of PerfectIt, and this is a good example. PerfectIt will check consistency in the document in a way that Word’s tools simply can’t. You can install stylesheets to suit particular clients (or create your own). I recently had a job using Chicago style (CMOS), and through the forums (thanks, Hilary Cadman!) found a ready-built one that was a big help.

PerfectIt is not the only add-in you can use. I’ve talked about ClipX before, which is an add-in to Windows rather than Word. It’s a clipboard expander that allows you to see the last 25 entries in your clipboard, so you can reuse them. I’ve just discovered it too has add-ins and one, Stickies, maintains a constant list of entries. I use this a lot when I’m manually tagging a file, so I can quickly insert tags.

6. Learn Word

I’ve saved this for last, but perhaps it should be first. Invest some time in learning to use Word to its full potential, as it will repay you time and again. Many of the things above are rooted in a knowledge of how best to use Word. As you get more familiar with Word you’ll be able to customise your set-up, helping you to use it more efficiently. A great resource to help with this is the CIEP course Editing with Word. This will give you a good introduction to many of the things I’ve talked about above.

Andy Coulson is a reformed engineer and primary teacher, and a Professional Member of CIEP. He is a copyeditor and proofreader specialising In STEM subjects and odd formats like LaTeX.

 

 


‘What’s e-new?’ was a regular column in the SfEP’s magazine for members, Editing Matters. The column has moved onto the blog until its new home on the CIEP website is ready.

Members can browse the Editing Matters back catalogue through the Members’ Area.


Photo credits: keyboard – Halacious; tourist map – pixpoetry, both on Unsplash

Proofread by Emma Easy, Intermediate Member.
Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.