Hi jon
jon_banquer wrote:
A good and pretty comprehensive primer which answer many of your
questions can be found at:
Creating a Template (Part II, by John McGhie)
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customizat...platePart2.htm
If you follow that while creating your template and subsequent document,
you won't have problems with stray formatting anymore, either.
[..]
Use the built-in styles, but change them to your liking.
Please be more specific. How do I name Heading Styles and make Word
happy ?
I repeat: you don't! (Or: I would not.)
In the mean time, curiosity got the better of me, and I actually did
download your document. As others have stated in this thread: you might
have mentioned its size when posting -- and you might also have stripped
it down to a sensible size for us to download!
The document looks at least structered in the sense that styles have
been used in favour of direct formatting. There are, however, empty
paragraphs every other page (well, I didn't look too far into the
document, to be honest) -- that's something which is a no-no in any long
document.
Plus: you have way too many styles to describe _structure_, i.e. a
handful of Heading 2 and Heading 3 styles each, w/ and w/o 6pt spacing
before/after etc. I would never do that. The style name should (try to)
describe what a paragraph is, and the definition of the style should
determine how the paragraph is supposed to look. But you do not want
more than one "Heading 2 style" (at least not when your headings are
unnumbered). So, before we go any further: Why do you think you need 3
different styles with different formatting, if all instances really are
headings of the 2nd or 3rd hierarchy?
I intentionally did not delete the above article in this post, so I
really urge you: read it.
Example:
How would I name a Heading 2 Style that has a space of 6 before and 6
after so that Word is happy and doesn't change the name? What do you
suggest I base this Heading 2 Style on and what should I use for the
following paragraph when the following paragraphs are different thru
out the document ?
I would simply _not_ define more than one Heading 2 style. More to
spacing before/above at the bottom of this post.
The definition of follow-up style is a property that helps the writer,
i.e., when you are in a paragraph of this style, and you hit Return,
then the new paragraph has this follow-up style set. It really is only a
setting that kicks-in in this very Return. Afterwards, the writer may
decide to reassign a different style, and the follow-up of the above
paragraph will never be re-evaluated.
When I decide on a styleset for a new type of document, today more than
ever, I ask myself: how many styles do I really need? Take as many as
absolutely needed, as few as possible.
Is it my imagination or are Microsoft users very fearful of the
applications that Microsoft makes ?
[out-of-context error] Sorry, you lost me there. :-)
Or are you saying that there is the possibility to name styles and folks
are not using them enough? Maybe so. Especially when dealing with long
documents, in time one usually tends to think in "CSS terms": the
document creator should focus an writing content and needs to define
_what_ a certain paragraph is (bodytext, heading x, etc.). The template
creator needs to specify how a certain type of paragraph should look
like. And if this guy specifies 30 styles instead of 10, then the writer
will probably either kick his behinds or only use a fraction of the styles.
[Besides, I shudder to think what would happen if people really used up
all features there are in Word ;-)]
I gotta tell you I'm not very impressed with MS Word so far for long
documents and desktop publishing.
Well, Microsoft (not even marketing, I'd wager) doesn't pretend that
Word is a DTP application. You can try to use it as one, but you will
always get poorer results than with, say, LaTeX or Indesign.
But if you learn to use Word professionally, you will reach maybe 80-90%
of the overall "quality" (though who would really be able to measure
that ...) of the above products. The question is, whether you will find
anyone to be willing to pay for the top 10-20%.
Now, if you *do* work in Word, and end up having to do the finish on
such a well-structured document (making it ready for PrePress, for
instance), then and only then can you think about deviating from your
styleset. For instance, if you really invest a lot in this document, you
might turn off automatic hyphenation and apply hyphenation manually (and
sparingly) throughout the document. You might change a spacing before or
after in some paragraph or other, but _very_ sparingly. I would, *in
this case only*, use direct formatting -- simply beceause it's very easy
to strip it out for the second edition of the next printing. But more
likely than spacing before/after I'd set one of the properties in the
2nd tab of Format | Paragraph, to force one para to a new page ("Keep
with next", "Keep lines togehter", etc.).
YMMV
Robert
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