🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello all,

QUESTION:

When doing a mail merge in Word 5.0 (Macintosh version), how can one
prevent some "<<" and ">>" characters from being interpreted as merge
markers ?

DETAILS:

I am writing a big document (PhD thesis) and I intend to use Word's mail
merge feature to partially automate cross-referencing through my document,
by defining one merge variable for each reference point. Example:

***these_xref***
<<set intro=1
<<set intro.conventions=<<intro>>.1
<<set topic=2
...

***these***
<<include these_xref
Chapter <<intro>> - Introduction
...
<<intro.conventions>>. Conventions
...
Chapter <<topic>> - Topic
...
see conventions in <<intro.conventions>>
...

So far, so good. The problem is that the meta-characters "<<" and ">>" are
set union and intersection characters in the Symbol font, and I definitely
need those symbols for themselves in my document. When merging, though,
Word catches them, reports an error and messes the output.

Does anyone know if there is an official way to somehow "quote" those
characters so that they pass through when merging ?

If not, can anyone suggest the most clever trick to circumvent the problem ?

Final note: I don't have Word 6 and have neither the time, opportunity,
disk space, memory capacity nor CPU muscle to install it.

Thanks in advance for any help,

        Charles
______________________________________________________________________
Charles PECHEUR                                Tel  :  +32 41 66 26 64
Universite de Liege, Systemes et Automatique   Secr :  +32 41 66 26 91
Institut Montefiore, bat. B 28                 Fax  :  +32 41 66 29 89
B 4000 LIEGE (BELGIUM)
<pecheur@montefiore.ulg.ac.be>  (ISO Latin-1 OK)