🚀 go-pugleaf

Here are a few miscellaneous tips I have picked up.

1) You can break a justified paragraph in the middle (e.g. to manually
place a figure) without losing the justification on the last line by
inserting a 'soft-return' where you want the break to be. A 'soft-return'
is <shift>-<return>.

2) Word 5.x lets you stretch and squash text, which is often better than
using 'condensed' or 'expanded' styles. With paragraph markers invisible,
copy the text to the clipboard as a picture. The command to do this is not
on the default menu, but is in the Tools-Commands dialogue box. Paste the
graphic back in. You will no longer be able to edit it (so save a text
version first), but if you can resize it by holding down the shift key
while you drag the handles.

If you want something all on one page and it is just too long, you can use
this technique to help. Set the right margin so that the text all fits on
(although it is too wide) and then copy the entire page as a picture.
Paste it back in, and then squash it horizontally. You can do a similar
thing for text in table cells that must not spill over onto two lines.

3) Paste-link is useful for cross referencing figure numbers and suchlike
in a document. But it doesn't work for paragraph numbers if you use
automatic numbering of paragraphs, because the links get lost when you
renumber. Also, if you have a lot of links in a document, Word sometimes
loses track of some of them which is a real pain.

4) Preparing a references list with automatic numbering in Word where some
references are cited more than once in the text seems to be impossible. (I
have tried using a paste-link on the reference marker, but it upsets the
automatic numbering of all the following references - try it!) Instead, I
enter the references as index entries in the text, in the form (Smith,
1992). So I type (Smith, 1995.i.Smith, A. B., D. Jones (1992) J. Spam 56,
p. 23#;) with the appropriate bits formatted as hidden text. The #
suppresses page numbers in the resultant index when you generate it. You
do get a few annoying commas that need tidying up, and if you want bold
and italic styles, you need to put this in by hand afterwards, but it is
less trouble than manually trying to keep track of reference numbers. To
save typing, each time I enter a new reference, I save it as a glossary
entry.

I suppose EndNote Plus would provide a more elegant solution, but not
everyone can afford to buy it.

I am interested in swapping more hints like these, so if anyone has
anything useful or even just interesting or odd to offer...