[Typeaux]

"Jean-Guy Marcil" wrote:

I understand that this is not personal, and I am not taking this personally.

Thank you, Jean-Guy. It was in no way intended to be a personal attack.

However, while I will admit that FrameMaker is better in this regard and that
the solution I suggested (not knowing any other way of doing this) requires
manual handling, I still think you are over-reacting a tad... It is just a
white rectangle hiding a word...

Therein lies the problem, I think, since it is not an *obvious* white
rectangle covering a word. Someone having to add another table to the string
in the future would likely be stymied by this solution. Some documents have
long lives.

I do not think it is diabolical, Mickey Mousy, part of the top ten most
inelegant solutions of all time or that it could lead to suicide!

My overstatement was intended to be humorous, though I confess it is
undeniably *dark* humor...

Let me say again that I appreciate your taking the time to describe in
impressive detail your fix for this problem. This shows cleverness and
fortitude on your part, and while it may well violate the current style guide
under which I'm laboring, I can see its usefulness for many other situations
where the document, as you put it, "is more or less stable."

I have used this approach a few times with manuals that had over 1,000 pages
(not all of them laid out as tables..) and it was fairly painless and fast
once I got the hang of it. You can decide not to use the REF field/bookmark
step (above) and copy paste the text instead. You just need to remember to
change it in two locations if it gets edited later on.

Still inelegant, but maybe less diabolical!

And I'm sure it works, given your obvious expertise and experience with it.
Again, thank you for thinking this through and sharing your solution. I must
remember that MS Word is a word processing program, not a full-fledged
desktop publishing solution, and as such certain... inadequacies, if you
will... are to be tolerated.

This company did try FrameMaker awhile back, but went about it wrong. They
purchased the program, gave it to a single writer who had never seen it, then
told the writer to "learn it quickly" without any training or support.
Naturally, this writer was overwhelmed (as was I the first time I tried to
use FrameMaker in much the same scenario back in 1996), and reported that she
could not learn it well enough in the short time alotted, so they sent it
back and maintained the attitude that it was just too difficult.

There is also the compatibility issues, since the Engineering staff all use
Word. It is never a simple solution.

My thanks again for your help and input, Jean-Guy.

-- Typeaux