Posts Tagged typesetting

Improving the MS Word Experience

By Matt

June 17th, 2009

During the process of writing my master’s thesis, I learned how to use LaTeX. Prior to this experience, I certainly wasn’t fond of using Word, particularly for creating large documents with figures and bibliographies, but now I know I’ll never go back, if I can help it. Word is, however, what most academics I’ve encountered use for writing papers (perhaps in a slightly better world they’d be using OpenOffice instead). Thus, if you’re going to collaborate with other Word users, sometimes you just have to buckle down and use it.

Fortunately, while recently working on a paper in Word, I came across a few bits of information that made using Word just a bit more tolerable, and led to the production of a slightly more attractive document, in my opinion. These tips are particularly relevant to authors using a document template for, say, a conference submission. (In my case it was the ACM CHI template for CSCW.)

  1. Enable auto-hyphenation. With this setting enabled, Word will try to hyphenate long words at the end of justified paragraphs to minimize unsightly lines of text with far too much space between words. For some reason, the auto-hyphenate option is disabled by default. When using a two-column, justified paragraph layout as in the ACM template, using auto-hyphenate can really make your documents look better, and may even allow you to squeeze in a bit of extra content. See this MS support page to learn how to enable auto-hyphenation. (Fortunately, LaTeX already does this quite nicely.)
  2. Manually insert hyphenation suggestions when necessary. In some cases Word is unable to hyphenate a word at the right edge of a column (particularly words it doesn’t recognize). For these occasions you can manually insert an invisible hyphen suggestion. If it needs to, Word will hyphenate the word at the point you suggest. Again, see this MS support page to learn how to insert hyphenation suggestions. It’s easy. If you enable the option to view all formatting marks, you can see all of the manual hyphenation suggestions you insert (and delete them as well).
  3. Insert the proper dash manually. Dashes are long versions of the hyphen (see the wikipedia page on dashes for an overview). I used to rely on AutoCorrect to adjust multiple hyphens into a dash, but no longer. With num-lock on, insert an en dash using Ctrl + - and an em dash with Ctrl + Alt + -.
  4. Insert ellipses manually. Use Ctrl + Alt + <period>.
  5. Use relative positioning for your figures. Instead of trying to manually position your figures, anchor them to a place within your text that makes sense (e.g., where you first reference it). By doing this you can position figures relative to the top or bottom of page margins, and they will automatically move with the anchor point as you edit the text. See this MS support page to see how to enable relative positioning. (Once on this page, expand the option “Position a drawing object in relation to page, text, or other anchor.”) Find out how to set an anchor point for your figures in one of the responses on this page. (Incidentally, this person advocates not placing figures in a text box, but I find that placing figures/graphs/tables in text boxes makes it easier to maintain the relative caption position. If you have a better way of handling it, please let me know!)
    Once I adopted relative positioning with in-text anchors, I no longer had to wait until the end of the writing process to position my figures.

I hope some of these tips make your Word experience more bearable. In the mean time, take a look at LaTeX.

m

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