On what gnikcuf planet does Word make sense? I just used the bulleted list feature, which made several paragraphs a bulleted list. That worked -- except when Word bulletized the list, it changed from justified to FL/RR. Huh? So I fixed that, but the indents weren't far enough (it was a bulleted list under another bulleted list item), so I clicked on the "Indent further" button.
Bingo, MFWurd indented it further ... and changed the bullets into f*cking numbers! Who the f*ck's in charge, me or some programmer in Redmond?
Try changing page numbers, or even inserting them, and then try changing them from arabic to roman!
Or inserting a full-page PDF as an image. Does it come in at ... oh ... full size? Of course not. Why do it the reasonable way? The image is imported at about 85% and God only knows how to reposition it. Well, I could drag it with the selection cursor, but that's as tricky as grabbing eels. I'm left to double click on the frame to open the options, tab here, tab there, jeez... And of the three PDFs, Word garbled up two of them (simply omitting the continent of Africa in a vector graphic, but leaving Madagascar!). So I had to JPEG those two pages.
> I just used the bulleted list feature, which made several paragraphs a bulleted list. That worked -- except when Word bulletized the list, it changed from justified to FL/RR. Huh? So I fixed that, but the indents weren't far enough (it was a bulleted list under another bulleted list item), so I clicked on the "Indent further" button.
> Bingo, MFWurd indented it further ... and changed the bullets into ... numbers! Who ...'s in charge, me or some programmer in Redmond?
_Never_, _ever_ use local formatting in Word if there is any sort of other option --- just make a new style and apply that.
William
-- William Adams senior graphic designer Fry Communications Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
> On what gnikcuf planet does Word make sense? I just used the bulleted list feature, which made several paragraphs a bulleted list. That worked -- except when Word bulletized the list, it changed from justified to FL/RR. Huh? So I fixed that, but the indents weren't far enough (it was a bulleted list under another bulleted list item), so I clicked on the "Indent further" button.
It's better to set bullets using one of the bullet-in bullet list styles. You are doing it like one of the people you hate. Stop blaming Word and use the correct process.
> On what gnikcuf planet does Word make sense? I just used the bulleted list feature, which made several paragraphs a bulleted list. That worked -- except when Word bulletized the list, it changed from justified to FL/RR. Huh? So I fixed that, but the indents weren't far enough (it was a bulleted list under another bulleted list item), so I clicked on the "Indent further" button.
> Bingo, MFWurd indented it further ... and changed the bullets into f*cking numbers! Who the f*ck's in charge, me or some programmer in Redmond?
> Try changing page numbers, or even inserting them, and then try changing them from arabic to roman!
> Or inserting a full-page PDF as an image. Does it come in at ... oh ... full size? Of course not. Why do it the reasonable way? The image is imported at about 85% and God only knows how to reposition it. Well, I could drag it with the selection cursor, but that's as tricky as grabbing eels. I'm left to double click on the frame to open the options, tab here, tab there, jeez... And of the three PDFs, Word garbled up two of them (simply omitting the continent of Africa in a vector graphic, but leaving Madagascar!). So I had to JPEG those two pages.
> -- > you are subscribed to "InDesign talk" on Google Groups, to post: send email to indesign-talk@googlegroups.com, to unsubscribe: send email to indesign-talk+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com, for more options visit http://groups.google.com/group/indesign-talk
Bob
Robert K Severn Severn Associates Marketing Services rsev...@severnet.com
"Make a deal with the devil, and you're the junior partner" Dick Armey
Michael B. wrote: > I need drugs and commiseration.
Or maybe you need the handy-dandy solution I've found to all my Word problems, which at least on the basis of my own experience I can recommend to others without hesitation for at least a trial. And that is, whenever you have something in Word and whatever it is, import it into InDesign and deal with it there. Yes, you have to redo certain things and there are problems. But they're InDesign problems, which I've consistently found to be of an utterly different nature than Word problems.
Take it or leave it. It works for me.
The only thing I'm going into Word for these days is to sort on a column, and right now I'm thinking I don't even need it for that. There may be a way to do it without even having to mess with the text (a script or plug-in or something), but I can always copy or move the column I want to sort on to make it leftmost, convert it to text and then use the SortParagraphs sample script to get my sort. It may remain quicker to do it in Word, but it's a nice thought nonetheless.
On Jul 8, 6:12 pm, Roy McCoy <roymccoy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Michael B. wrote:
> > I need drugs and commiseration.
> Or maybe you need the handy-dandy solution I've found to all my Word problems, which at least on the basis of my own experience I can recommend to others without hesitation for at least a trial. And that is, whenever you have something in Word and whatever it is, import it into InDesign and deal with it there. Yes, you have to redo certain things and there are problems. But they're InDesign problems, which I've consistently found to be of an utterly different nature than Word problems.
BTDT, Roy
The job started as a Word file that the client wanted edited and laid
out as a book. I used MSW to edit and then took it into ID to lay
out. (BTW, the project was a "2 -fer" as in 2 documents totaling 2
hundred pages finished in 2 weeks. Yowza!)
Then at the end, the client asked me to give him the text in Word so
his client, the ultimate recipient, could use it to copy and paste,
but he wanted it to resemble the original with all the edits. Hence,
my trip with Dante into Hell.
BTW, Jules. Why does Word have two ways to do something, the slapdash
way with weird rules (for secretaries, I suppose, who are by
definition hapless) and the "right" way for the cognoscenti? I don't
blame Word for doing it a different way, but for devising a UI that is
incomprehensibly non-intuitive. I tried to apply styles (using both
the style box at the upper left and the Formatting palette). I had to
click on the style name 3, 4, 6 times before I just gave up. Yet on
the very next page, I could click on the same style name and it would
work. You tell me, where's the logic in that? Where's the user-
friendliness? Where's the "improved efficiency"?
> On Jul 8, 6:12 pm, Roy McCoy <roymccoy...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Michael B. wrote: >>> I need drugs and commiseration.
>> Or maybe you need the handy-dandy solution I've found to all my Word problems, which at least on the basis of my own experience I can recommend to others without hesitation for at least a trial. And that is, whenever you have something in Word and whatever it is, import it into InDesign and deal with it there. Yes, you have to redo certain things and there are problems. But they're InDesign problems, which I've consistently found to be of an utterly different nature than Word problems.
> BTDT, Roy
> The job started as a Word file that the client wanted edited and laid > out as a book. I used MSW to edit and then took it into ID to lay > out. (BTW, the project was a "2 -fer" as in 2 documents totaling 2 > hundred pages finished in 2 weeks. Yowza!)
> Then at the end, the client asked me to give him the text in Word so > his client, the ultimate recipient, could use it to copy and paste, > but he wanted it to resemble the original with all the edits. Hence, > my trip with Dante into Hell.
> BTW, Jules. Why does Word have two ways to do something, the slapdash > way with weird rules (for secretaries, I suppose, who are by > definition hapless) and the "right" way for the cognoscenti? I don't > blame Word for doing it a different way, but for devising a UI that is > incomprehensibly non-intuitive. I tried to apply styles (using both > the style box at the upper left and the Formatting palette). I had to > click on the style name 3, 4, 6 times before I just gave up. Yet on > the very next page, I could click on the same style name and it would > work. You tell me, where's the logic in that? Where's the user- > friendliness? Where's the "improved efficiency"?
> -- > you are subscribed to "InDesign talk" on Google Groups, to post: send email to indesign-talk@googlegroups.com, to unsubscribe: send email to indesign-talk+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com, for more options visit http://groups.google.com/group/indesign-talk
Bob
Robert K Severn Severn Associates Marketing Services rsev...@severnet.com
"Make a deal with the devil, and you're the junior partner" Dick Armey
In the event you hadn't come across it, the following site has a
wealth of real world Word info:
http://word.mvps.org/
I'm often forced by various corporate realities/limitations/narrow-
mindedness/stupidity (take your pick) to struggle with Word as a
"publlshing" platform. Going back and forth between Word and ID
introduces the need to engage in cleaning up both repeatedly.
The mvps site often leads me to solutions. There's a Mac and a PC
page. One thing I've done is to customize a formatting palette with
often-used commands that are other wise deeply buried in layers of
dialogs.
Wordplay Consulting kor...@wp-consulting.com
Strategic Information Design
Coauthor of "How to Communicate Technical Information"
—called the "Bible" of technical communication
> I'm often forced by various corporate realities/limitations/narrow- > mindedness/stupidity (take your pick) to struggle with Word as a > "publlshing" platform.
Your site is great, but I'd like to add an observation. Word can be used as an adequate publishing platform, but is has its limitations. It's not a layout application. To do a book the easy way, you use the Word built-in styles and adjust them to best fit your taste. The interface can be baffling, but so can InDesign.
As many of you will recall, I did a book-length legal work a few months ago in Word 2007. I used Bembo instead of my preferred Minion because I have all the Bembo alternate sets. I used ID for the index because it would have taken me too much time to learn how to format it in Word. I was very happy with the result and so was the client.
I find the constant carping about Word annoying. Like many others here, I have problems using Illustrator, mainly because I am unfamiliar with it. I do my vector designs in Corel and export them to Illustrator for use in InDesign. I do not constantly complain about it and deride it with insulting names. I think it would be only civil of the Word haters to leave the sneers out when asking for advice, especially when ignorance and poor professional policies are the cause of your problems, not the inadequacy of the application.
> I find the constant carping about Word annoying.
We wouldn't carp about it if we didn't have to use it, even if our use is limited to the few seconds that it takes to place a customer's Word file in ID, the following hours being spent in ID, not in Word, repairing the damage.
One of the problems with Word is that there are so few real-life parallels that can be produced, it is uniquely out of place, uniquely inappropriate. If surgeons used a hammer and chisel during heart surgery, we would certainly carp about them as we carp about Word. If our best cars were Trabants, we would also carp. If our restaurants offered up dishes rescued from the city dump, we would carp briefly before dying...
Perhaps political life offers the best parallel. We elected Bush, Blair and Berlusconi, so why should we not be happy with Word?
> We wouldn't carp about it if we didn't have to use it, even if our use is > limited to the few seconds that it takes to place a customer's Word file in > ID, the following hours being spent in ID, not in Word, repairing the damage.
Repair the damage in Word. There are many techniques for making the job easier. It's not Word's fault that your clients give you lousy files. Anne-Marie Concepci n has several articles and tutorials on this.
Jules wrote: > Word can be used as an adequate publishing platform, but is has its limitations. It's not a layout application. To do a book the easy way, you use the Word built-in styles and adjust them to best fit your taste. The interface can be baffling, but so can InDesign.
I don't agree that InDesign's interface is comparable to Word's, but you nonetheless remind me of something that impressed me in Michael Kleper's 1987 Illustrated Handbook of Desktop Publishing and Typesetting, and that I've never forgotten: "Word's suitability as front-end software for typesetting already has been proven with Allied Linotype's selection for use in its typesetting systems." (p.435) Kleper didn't say that it was suitable for setting everything, however, and in the same book he discussed around a hundred other programs with various capabilities for different uses.
So, yes, you could do a straight, no-layout book with Word in 1987 and you still can now - but I would never want to do that even if I can. I think InDesign has usable default styles too (I don't know, I don't keep them), and whatever ease Word's built-in styles might provide is generally, I'm quite sure, offset by a mass of problems and clunkinesses that many of us rightfully don't like, and even - rightfully or not - despise.
> So, yes, you could do a straight, no-layout book with Word in 1987 and you > still can now - but I would never want to do that even if I can. I think > InDesign has usable default styles too (I don't know, I don't keep them), and > whatever ease Word's built-in styles might provide is generally, I'm quite > sure, offset by a mass of problems and clunkinesses that many of us rightfully > don't like, and even - rightfully or not - despise.
The point is that you use it when it's the best tool for the job. InDesign can't handle some jobs that Word does beautifully, such as my aforementioned book of legal citations.
It's also, in my opinion, the best tool for correcting badly done Word files.
Jules wrote: > The point is that you use it when it's the best tool for the job. InDesign can't handle some jobs that Word does beautifully, such as my aforementioned book of legal citations.
> It's also, in my opinion, the best tool for correcting badly done Word files.
Okay, this may be the case. Whether it is or isn't, I'm just glad I don't ever have to use it to get anything to press.
But I just recently had a badly done Word file, come to think of it.
Isn't this perhaps the kind of file you're referring to? I considered leaving it in Word, sure. But this time it took me less than a minute to decide to bring it into ID and whip it out there, and I don't regret the decision in the slightest.
> Isn't this perhaps the kind of file you're referring to? I considered leaving it in Word, sure. But this time it took me less than a minute to decide to bring it into ID and whip it out there, and I don't regret the decision in the slightest.
It depends on a number of factors, so I'm not going to rely on any given file for answers. All I can say that I have never had any problems placing a properly prepared Word file in inDesign. I prefer Word for word processing functions. It's what I use when I write. Unless there's some reason not to, I use Word to massage a file, and InDesign to lay it out. I don't have an emotional attachment to either one. It's strictly a professional decision. I charge my clients for the work, no matter how I do it. If they give me files that require a lot of cleaning up, they pay for it. Since Word is the most common file, I've learned to use to its best advantage.
Jules wrote: > I really don't understand all the complaining.
I think I may. You likely simply became accustomed to Word features in a way that others of us never did. There was a point where I started doing nearly everything in PageMaker, and after that point it was generally exasperating when I went back to Word. It really is clunky - those horrible panels and incomplete, unadjustable dropdown menus, for example. (My memory is vague on this, thankfully.) You just don't see it because you're so used to it.
LOL! AB I had to google Trabant, and I found these East German jokes. Maybe they are apt?
The Trabant car
Show-cased Trabant 601, 1963 • What's the best feature of a Trabant?: There's a heater at the back to keep your hands warm when you're pushing it. • A West German visitor is driving a Mercedes through East Germany on a rainy night when his windshield wipers stop working. He takes it to an East German mechanic, who tells him there are no Mercedes windshield wiper motors in the GDR, but he will do his best to fix it. When the businessman returns the next day, to his surprise the windshield wipers are working perfectly. "How did you find a Mercedes windshield wiper motor in the East?" he asks the mechanic. "We didn't," replies the mechanic, "We used the engine of a Trabant."
> One of the problems with Word is that there are so few real-life parallels that can be produced, it is uniquely out of place, uniquely inappropriate. If surgeons used a hammer and chisel during heart surgery, we would certainly carp about them as we carp about Word. If our best cars were Trabants, we would also carp. If our restaurants offered up dishes rescued from the city dump, we would carp briefly before dying...
-- An example of annoyances that draw complaints, is that apparently there are two ways to make bullets, you imply one of them is done by those in the know. Which one is that? Robert says he used the bulleted list feature. What did he do wrong?
More to the point, why does Word have so many options that are NOT "the correct process" ??
>> I just used the bulleted list feature, which made several paragraphs a bulleted list. That worked -- except when Word bulletized the list, it changed from justified to FL/RR. Huh? So I fixed that, but the indents weren't far enough (it was a bulleted list under another bulleted list item), so I clicked on the "Indent further" button.
> It's better to set bullets using one of the bullet-in bullet list styles. You are doing it like one of the people you hate. Stop blaming Word and use the correct process.
> More to the point, why does Word have so many options that are NOT "the correct process"
Why does InDesign?
It's not a question of the correct process in some absolute sense, but the one that is appropriate to the job at hand. It's aimed at an immense base of users, some of whom are using it for very simple tasks such as writing letters. Others are presumably professionals who are creating long, structured documents. Turn one of your simpleton clients loose in InDesign and you'll wind up with similar problems, such as random use of styles and local formatting, zillions of text boxes and so on.
Why does InDesign have a truncated back-saving option? Word 2007 can back-save files to formats that can be read directly by Word 6 and earlier, as well as by just about other any word processing application, with all formatting intact and editable, in all of the world's principal languages and platforms.
I find the discussion, frankly, ridiculous. A lot of you are working on supposedly state-of-the-art, high-powered Macs, which have cranky operating systems, nasty font handling quirks and hair-pulling cross-platform issues. I have to deal with problems when I get my Mac clients' files. They send me PDFs (produced by some kind of built-in operating system application, I gather), that crash and burn when I try to extract their contents, among other problems. I am accustomed to their failings and I do not complain (although I will admit to snidely telling them to get a PC when they complain). I just work with them to get the job done.
Someone once observed that if we define normal as 2+2=4, the psychotic will say something not very useful such as apples plus bananas equal testicles, while the neurotic will say, yes, I know 2+2=4 but I can't STAND it. Word's quirks are irrelevant. All applications have quirks. Some of them are the object of condescending sneers (Windows), while others are blithely accepted as cute eccentricities (Macintosh). It's your job as a graphic designer to get the job down and get paid for it, not to feel superior when the truth is you can't put in the time, effort and intelligence to solve occasionally challenging problems.
> -- An example of annoyances that draw complaints, is that apparently there are two ways to make bullets, you imply one of them is done by those in the know. Which one is that? Robert says he used the bulleted list feature. What did he do wrong?
> -- An example of annoyances that draw complaints, is that apparently there are two ways to make bullets, you imply one of them is done by those in the know.
Not in the know. This is elementary word processing and layout procedure. Anyone who uses InDesign will understand it. It works in Word much the same way it does in InDesign. It's somewhat like selecting a series of paragraphs in InDesign and applying local bullet formatting using the Bullets and Numbering option in the Paragraph dialog box. I would have to do a comparison test to see the differences, such as which additional paragraph attributes are changed or retained. But the idea is the same.
> Which one is that? Robert
Michael
> says he used the bulleted list feature.
I'd have to see it, but I presume he used the Bullets icon on the ribbon bar and then the Indent More icon.
> What did he do wrong?
It depends on the situation. Using the ribbon bar icon to make bullets is suitable for short documents such as letters, or occasionally in longer unstructured documents with very simple formatting. It's a shortcut. It's not a proper practice in lengthy, structured documents with repetitive paragraph styles and sophisticated formatting. It's not a good idea to apply ribbon bar paragraph formatting -- such as indents, numbering and bullets -- more than once to the same text, as each option has its own indent scheme, among other effects, and they can interact in unanticipated ways.
> Not in the know. This is elementary word processing and layout procedure. Anyone who uses InDesign will understand it. It works in Word much the same way it does in InDesign. It's somewhat like selecting a series of paragraphs in InDesign and applying local bullet formatting using the Bullets and Numbering option in the Paragraph dialog box. I would have to do a comparison test to see the differences, such as which additional paragraph attributes are changed or retained. But the idea is the same.
>> Which one is that? Robert
> Michael
>> says he used the bulleted list feature.
> I'd have to see it, but I presume he used the Bullets icon on the ribbon bar and then the Indent More icon.
>> What did he do wrong?
> It depends on the situation. Using the ribbon bar icon to make bullets is suitable for short documents such as letters, or occasionally in longer unstructured documents with very simple formatting. It's a shortcut. It's not a proper practice in lengthy, structured documents with repetitive paragraph styles and sophisticated formatting. It's not a good idea to apply ribbon bar paragraph formatting -- such as indents, numbering and bullets -- more than once to the same text, as each option has its own indent scheme, among other effects, and they can interact in unanticipated ways.
I don't doubt that Word has lots of power and many useful features. It also has an absolutely diabolical interface. ("Diabolical" = throwing apart, not satanic, but that works for me, too).
Why is the bulleted list I create with the bullet icon on the ribbon or in the Formatting palette *different* from a bulleted list style? Apparently the MSW engineers set it up that way, and it's beyond my comprehension why they chose to do that. It does nothing more than frustrate users. "It is not a good idea to apply the ribbon formatting more than once, etc." is not the answer and explanation-- but it does point to the problem.
The first time I encountered some of this planned frustration came way back in the late 90s when I tried to change MFW's preset default to create superscript ordinals. I dislike them, so I went into AutoFormat and unchecked the option, okayed the box, and returned to typing. Bam! Another superscript ordinal. Whaaa? So I opened the AutoFormat dialog box to verify that the option was unchecked (it was). Then I noticed another tab, AutoFormatAsYouType. Hmmmmmm. Do you think ..? Nah, they wouldn't. But I checked anyway. I opened that tab and damned if the option for superscript ordinals was checked. I looked back at AutoFormat and it was not checked.
What gnikcuf programmer did that? Who on earth besides some pocket-protector person would put the same user option in two places and NOT LINK THEM, so that if you want to change it, you have to do it twice! That's beyond stupid.
That's what I'm talking about. I'm not complaining about why they put a command in one menu rather than another.
Using normal, everyday logic and intuitional inferences as practiced by an ostensibly smart person with many years of layout experience (that would be me), the user should have a 'reasonable expectation' that there is a consistency and uniformity of certain operations.
Not in Wurd. Click on the bullet list icon and the justification changes? Click to indent further and the bullet changes? The appearance of a bulleted list is different if I use different preset ways to create a bulleted paragraph makes NO sense.
Here's another thing. Try assigning a keyboard command to any one specific option in the Change Case dialog box. Can't do it. I use four in ID: sentence, title, all l.c., and all caps. Can't do that in MFW.
Applying styles is never easy. The pull-down menu at the upper list only displays five or six at a time, and the Formatting palette isn't much better. I often use 30, 40, or more in an ID file. I don't even try in Word.
Maybe the interface has improved since Mac Word 2004. I have to use MFW when I edit mss for clients, and then there's the post-partum terror I go through every now and then when the client asks to get the text back in Word to use later. In the case that drove me nuts, this was made clear from the beginning.
By the way, the comments on this Forum about AcroX deal with the very same issue: making really dumb decisions about the UI, not about the kinds of things Acro can do. If the company (Adobe or MS) is going to tout the "improved efficiency" of the newest versions don't f*** up the UI so that well-seasoned users scratch their heads in confusion and annoyance.
> What gnikcuf programmer did that? Who on earth besides some pocket-protector person would put the same user option in two places and NOT LINK THEM, so that if you want to change it, you have to do it twice! That's beyond stupid.
Large applications are programmed by groups of people who often have conflicting goals and lots of legacy baggage to deal with. Features get added and someone forgets a link. It's not stupidity, but a statistical function that is affected by management style. If you're serious about understanding this, please read "Why Things Don't Work," <http://cafecancun.com/bookarts/dontwork.shtml> my last published Playboy article. I'd also suggest "The Bug" by Ellen Ullman <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/05/25/RV188798.DTL>
> That's what I'm talking about. I'm not complaining about why they put a command in one menu rather than another.
Why aren't you as angry at In-DUH-sine?
> Using normal, everyday logic and intuitional inferences as practiced by an ostensibly smart person with many years of layout experience (that would be me), the user should have a 'reasonable expectation' that there is a consistency and uniformity of certain operations.
Yes, of course. A very noble goal. In the real world, however, this is not always the case. That's why people consult help, read manuals, buy books, take courses, participate in lists and forums, do independent research and educate themselves about the quirks of their daily work tools.
There's a larger issue, though, the idea that everything must be effortless, intuitive and fun.
During the early development of the missile program, the generals decided that any cook and baker should be able to access the computer controls and be able to launch an attack. They wanted them to be able to diagnose any problem through an online help system and dispense with written manuals altogether. This turned out not to be feasible. They did do printed manuals as well.
I always used to read the manuals cover-to-cover for my applications. I never subscribed to the just do it theory of computer use. I expect a program to have a learning curve and if I need it, I do what it takes to master its idiosyncrasies.
