> -----Original Message----- > From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu]On Behalf > Of Bradley Ferguson > Sent: Friday, 8 April 2005 2:08 AM > To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public. > Subject: Re: [OT][AD] MS Word, was Ideas for books on PIC > > > On Apr 6, 2005 8:17 PM, Tony Smith wrote: > > Styles aren't a good thing, they are THE thing. If you don't > know styles, > > you don't know Word. I have a friend in publishing, her job interviews > > start (and often end) with "Name 2 reasons why you'd use styles > in Word". > > 99% failure rate. She uses Word for the bulk of the work, and Quark for > > pre-press. > > > > The whole point of styles is to separate the formatting from > the content. > > Look at web publishing, what does the S in CSS stand for? Look at how > > PowerPoint handles styles. > > I guess I didn't phrase that right. Yes, I'm all for styles and > templates, etc. They provide useful meta-data (i.e., hints) instead > of random formatting changes. I just don't know what the current > level of integration is for Quark these days. I would assume the > integration would be sufficient, but Microsoft doesn't share their > file formats very readily. > > > You know why Word moves thing 1/8th of an inch? I do. It's because you > > line things up with spaces & then change fonts, hence the spaces get > > wider/smaller, or you indent with tabs (often multiple) without > setting the > > tab stops. Use paragraph indenting. Using the correct type of > tab helps > > too. > > I take great offense at the suggestion that I would try to indent with > spaces or misuse tabs. I can't think of any examples of this > specifically, but I know I've had major spacing issues with placing > graphs into Word documents and properly placing the graph caption. Well, I didn't mean you specifically. But most of the world does that. Easy to fix, replace newline/space with newline. No biggie. I've a FixThisCrap macro. Works well. You didn't say you were fiddling with pictures, as I said graphics layout sucks somewhat in Word. That's what Quark is for. Helps if you link pictures, not embed them. > > I've never had a problem with Excel graphs & VBA. Not sure why > you mention > > it, but sure, the defaults are ugly, but not hard to fix. I'd > say amateurs > > produce amateurish charts. Try www.j-walk.com. He wrote a > whole book on > > Excel graphs. Some are quite pretty. I do maps in Excel. > More than 32k > > data points would be nice though. > > I don't recall what settings they were, but I do recall that I was not > the only one running into this problem. As it was scientific data, it > would have been the XY scatter chart and probably had something to do > with axes or trace color/point style. This would have been 4 years > ago and I didn't write it down. I believe there was a MSDN article > about it. I bring it up because plots are fairly common in > engineering. Fair enough, software has bugs. Doesn't warrent "never ever use XL graphs in Word". You want XL gripes, I've got a huge list. > I'm not saying that things can't be done in Word or that they can't > even necessarily be done well. My main point was that you shouldn't > go nuts trying to format a book in Word, especially if you plan on > handing it off to a publisher. It is going to be very time consuming > to get Word to format the thing to your liking (assuming you care) and > then it's going to be difficult to reproduce. You ask the publisher for their stylesheet. They tell you what they want, not vice versa. Same for newspapers, magazines, etc. They want you to add the mark-ups. They want you link pictures, not embed them. Etc. Trust me, publisher fall over with shock if you hand them a doc with styles in it. At least it stops them charging you double for setup. They take your doc, apply their template, do a bit of minor fiddling (mainly whitespace cleanup) and it's done. Tony -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist