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Wordman's Production Corner

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Wordman's Production Corner Wordman’s Production Corner By Dick Eassom, AF.APMP Three Word Tricks ...Fractions, Diacritics, and Gibberish The Problems The first trick was inspired by the Office Challenge in TechRepublic (http://www.techrepublic.com/): “Why does Word convert some fractions but not others?” I’ll tell you why and how to expand that function. Secondly, I’ll explain how you can easily enter diacritics (also known as accents) while you’re typing some non-English words. For example, how do you quickly type “résumé”? And finally, I’ll show you how to insert dummy text into a document when you’re mocking up a template. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet… The Solutions Fractions When you type 1/2 followed by, say, a space, Word quickly converts the three fraction characters into a single ½ character. This is controlled by a setting in the Word Options dialog. Click the Office Button, and then Word Options. In the Word Options dialog, click Proofing and then AutoCorrect Options. Select the AutoFormat As You Type tab in the AutoCorrect dialog: continued on next page APMP Perspective 40 Volume 21, Issue 1, 2011 continued from previous page Check Fractions (1/2) with fraction character (½). Note that like any other AutoFormat As You Type option, you can press Ctrl+Z immediately after Word performs the automatic formatting to undo it. This only works with ¼, ½, and ¾, since these characters are the only fractions defined in Microsoft’s Windows-1252 code page, the legacy character encoding of the Latin alphabet found in most western European languages. Here we must dive into the history of character encoding. I will make this a shallow dive and try to explain it as simply as possible! In the beginning there was ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which defined the standard alphanumeric characters and some (now almost redundant) control codes, such as tab. This only required codes from 0 to 127, i.e., 7 bits. Nice and compact. Since computers use bytes (8 bits), characters from 0 to 255 are possible, and so many early personal computers, e.g., the Tandy TRS-80 (my first computer), used characters 128–255 for graphics, non-English characters, such as é, or special characters such as smiley faces. This became known as “extended ASCII.” When IBM introduced the original PC, they produced different extended ASCII character sets for different languages. PCs sold in the USA and Canada had a character set, called a “code page,” that included characters needed for French, German, and other European languages, as well as the characters that allowed you to create lines for boxes. If you wanted to use Greek characters, you were out of luck unless you had the Symbol font, where, for example, D was replaced by Δ. If you sent someone a document and they didn’t have the Symbol font loaded on their PC, all they saw were Latin characters. However, IBM PCs sold in the Greek market had a different code page that included the Greek characters. Confused yet? Hang in there, I’m nearly done… The International Standards Organization (ISO) released ISO 8859 with its own set of charac- ter sets, the most popular of which was ISO 8859-1, or “ISO Latin 1,” which covered the western European languages. ISO 8859-5 covered the Cyrillic alphabet, for example. However, ISO 8859- 1 did not define any characters in the range from 128–159, and many proprietary character sets had included characters in that range. So Microsoft created Code Page 1252 as a superset of ISO 8859-1. Windows-1252 became the standard character encoding system used by all western European versions of Windows, and most Internet standards. Code Page 1251 represented Cyrillic. But, if you didn’t specify that you were using Code Page 1251, your Russian would look like random Latin characters, since most systems default to Code Page 1252. “All well and good, Wordman,” I hear you say, “but what has this to do with fractions”? Wait, I’m getting there… The final part of my story concerns Unicode, a universal system for encoding all the characters used by all world languages. By using two or more bytes, the Unicode standard can theoretically support more than a million different characters, and Microsoft Windows has supported Unicode since the continued on next page APMP Perspective 41 Volume 21, Issue 1, 2011 continued from previous page days of Windows NT. All current operating systems (Windows 7, Mac OS X, etc.) use Unicode as their default character encoding standard. Simply put, we can now easily represent any character from almost all the modern languages through Unicode. Well, that was almost my final point. Just because Unicode defines a code for a certain character in a certain language, does not guarantee that the font face you’re using knows how to represent it. Whereas Arial can represent an Arabic aleph, Arial Black cannot. Back to fractions. Now you have a basic understanding, hopefully, of the history and evolving stan- dards of character representation in computers, I can tell you that Unicode defines other fraction characters beyond the ones mentioned above. To get to them, go to the Insert tab on the ribbon in Word, and in the Symbols group, click Symbol > More Symbols: I’ve selected the ¼ symbol, and, as you can see from the screenshot, this character is part of the Latin-1 Supplement subset of characters. There are several choices for how we can enter this sym- bol into our Word document: 1. AutoFormat: enter 1/4, which Word will autoformat to ¼ , as described above. 2. Insert Symbol: select the character, and then click Insert from the Symbol dialog. 3. Alt Shortcut: enter Alt+0188, i.e. press and hold down the Alt key, and then type 0, 1, 8 and 8 on your numeric keypad. 4. Unicode Shortcut: type 00BC, then character’s Unicode, and then press Alt+X. (Note that selecting a character in your text, then pressing Alt+X toggles between the character and its Unicode.) So where are these other fractions? In the Symbol dialog, click the Subset dropdown list and scroll down to Number Forms: continued on next page APMP Perspective 42 Volume 21, Issue 1, 2011 continued from previous page As you can see, there are characters for 1/3, 2/3, 1/8, 3/8, 5/8, and 7/8. Here are their Unicode equivalents: Fraction character Unicode ⅓1/3 2153 ⅓2/3 2154 ⅓1/8 215B ⅓3/8 215C ⅓5/8 215D ⅓7/8 215E Note that not every font face will be able to reproduce these characters: for example, whereas they are reproduced correctly in Times New Roman and Arial, the ⅓ and ⅔ characters are not in, say, Tahoma. Knowing the Unicodes, you can easily enter these fractions when you need them. However, if you select ⅓ and click AutoCorrect, you can get Word to automatically replace, say, 1/3 with a ⅓ character: continued on next page APMP Perspective 43 Volume 21, Issue 1, 2011 continued from previous page Word will automatically insert the ⅓ character in the With box, so all you need to do is to enter 1/3 in the Replace box next to it. Select Plain text in the options above so that the character you insert- ed will assume the font your text is in, and then click OK. You can repeat this for the other fractions listed above. For fractions that don’t have Unicode characters, you can use superscript and subscript, for exam- 99 ple: /100. Remember the shortcut key combinations: • Superscript: Ctrl+Shift+= • Subscript: Ctrl+= Diacritics A diacritic is an accent or other mark (or “ancillary glyph”) added to a letter (or “basic glyph”) to change the sound of that letter. The Unicode system described above allows virtually every combi- nation of letter and diacritic used in modern languages. The Windows-1252 code page included all these combinations used in the western European lan- guages, and Word has always given us a shortcut key for the most common of these on the US keyboard layout (it will vary for non-US keyboard layouts). For example, to type é, press Ctrl+’, then e. Here’s a table of the diacritics, their shortcuts, and which letters the shortcut work with: continued on next page APMP Perspective 44 Volume 21, Issue 1, 2011 continued from previous page Diacritic Shortcut Works for Acute accent Ctrl+’ á Á é É í Í ó Ó ú Ú ý Ý Grave accent Ctrl+‘ à À è È ì Ì ò Ò ù Ù (with d, produces eth: ð Ð) Circumflex Crl+^ â  ê Ê î Î ô Ô û Û Tilde Ctrl+~ ã à ñ Ñ õ Õ Diaresis/Umlaut Ctrl+: ä Ä ë Ë ï Ï ö Ö u Ü ÿ Ÿ Cedilla Ctrl+, ç Ç Diphthong Ctrl+& æ Æ œ Œ Ring above Ctrl+@ å Å Caron Alt+Ctrl+^ š Š Stroke Ctrl+/ ø Ø (with c, produces cent, ¢) If you need a letter and diacritic combination that is not in this table, you can go to Symbol > More Symbols on the Insert tab of the ribbon, and find them there. Gibberish When you’re setting up a new proposal or other document template, it’s useful to be able to insert some dummy text to see what your page layout will look like. Word has always included this feature but to use it, go to Office Button > Word Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options and make sure that Replace text as you type is checked in the AutoCorrect dialog: To insert random text, type =rand() and press Enter.
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