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Thanks Hans! I feel like I’ve been gifted a Harry Potter magic spell!

I haven’t actually tried your magic yet — but will do so as soon as time allows. My solution that day was to just lower all the objects by the same amount (25 pts, I think), using the Format-Font-Character-Spacing settings, and F4-ing on each object. So far the author/attorney hasn’t complained.

Can’t wait to try your code tho, it’ll be a great learning curve for me. (Code is usually off my map — nobody mentioned computer programming to me when I was in college (that was in the late 60s) and I’ve never picked it up. At that time girls were encouraged to major in Home Economics or Teaching. Sigh.)

Judy

As luck (?) would have it, a Table of Authorities I was working on just a couple days ago had this very problem. Some cites had been added, and everything looked fine, but the table didn’t blink an eye when I tried to refresh it.

We’d had several typists working on this doc, and it had been emailed back and forth between offices in different states, probably using different systems. I don’t know if that can have a bearing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.

So, on a hunch, I just deleted the whole table and inserted it anew — and voila, everything was in place!

Go figure. (But no figure SKATING for a while, Katy!)

JudyL

“When there are so many cooks working the stew, it’s hard to know who put in the vinegar.”
Stanley Renshon, Political Scientist

Here’s one way it happens to us:

The text editing involved moving blocks of text,
and those blocks of text contain marked cites,
and after the move the short cites appeared in the doc BEFORE the long cites appeared.

The long cite must be the first occurrence of a cite in the doc.

This placement rule includes cites in footnotes — so it’s best to mark cites, and later review them, in Print Layout view rather than in normal view.

Good luck with your TOA! (I think luck is part of it, actually…..)
Judy

I just discovered an interesting function called “Shrink to Fit” that might be useful to you, if I understand your goal. It is found in the File-Print-Preview screen’s toolbar.

This is the experiment I played with:

– set document margins to 4”x6”,
– overfill the 2-column table to the point that a new page is created,
– then press the “Shrink to Fit” button that appears in File-Print-Preview view.

In my experiment this automatically reduced the font size of the whole table so that it all fit perfectly onto one page.

(What is the “Style Separator”? Sorry to be ignorant about this.)

My Word 2003 has always opened up with a setting of

FORMAT / COLUMNS / WIDTH AND SPACING / COL#: 1 / WIDTH: 6 INCHES,

which is particularly visually noticeable in landscape mode. My wide margin appears on the right of the page, tho, which is at least a little more logical than your wide left margin. Anyway, just clicking

FORMAT / COLUMNS / PRESETS / ONE

physically returns the doc to its default margins. There has to be a setting that is causing this, someplace, but I’ve never found it. Have decided to consider it an endearing eccentricity of the program.

Another sneaky setting to check is

FILE / PAGE SETUP / MARGINS / GUTTER.

Any number in that slot will increase the selected margin, and it’s not a setting that most of us are used to glancing at in the Page Setup screen.

Right — the whole formula for setting Track Changes ON or OFF when copying redlined text from one document into another is this (if I’m not mistaken):

Source doc OFF, Receiving doc OFF = Pasted text retains original tracking (we call it redlining in my office)
Source doc ON, Receiving doc OFF = Pasted text is clean (tracking is “accepted”)

and, logically:
Source doc OFF or ON, Receiving doc ON = All of the copied text is redlined.

This is also true within one document. With Track Changes ON, copy desired text containing redlining. Turn Track Changes OFF before pasting text to second location in doc. The original text retains redlining, and the new pasted text is clean, with edits incorporated. (The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office made us figure this out a few years ago, for proper completion of patent application amendment forms. One section presented patent claims having all proposed edits redlined, and another section in the same doc showed the claims all nice and clean, with edits accepted. This method, of turning Track Changes ON and then OFF for the paste, caused less confusion for the typist than pasting the redlined text into the second section and then accepting redlining for just that block of text.)

Judy

Pingdat: just an easy-to-type and fun-to-say name I made up. Rhymes with Dingbat. Makes me smile.

Judy

[What’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget. Freud. (Streisand?)]

And, as always in Word, there are other keystrokes to achieve the same results.

En dash is
Em dash is (or )

Odd. Our settings are English (US), and we have had to add “centre” to our exclude dictionaries because spellcheck does not otherwise stop on it.

I’ve had some luck with just copying a whole document (with the desired styles in use in said document, applied to actual text) into the receiving document, and then just immediately deleting that inserted whole document from the receiving document. The styles themselves seem to remain “in” the receiving document, and usable.

Confusion occurs if the styles in both docs are named the same, I believe, but new styles are defined as they were in the inserted doc, in my limited experimentation.

Using a continuous section break instead of a hard paragraph return at the end of the paragraph seems to work, especially if you put a few shift-entries throughout the paragraph to spread the text out a bit, to tighten the spacing of the last line.

I’m not sure if this accurately preserves the 6pt-after spacing. Looks close anyway.

The shift-entries would be tedious if you have more than just a couple paragraphs needing this configuration, but the section break could probably be done globally.

No, on second thought, that wouldn’t work, it’s not the way the line numbering works.

But something similar might work using field numbered paragraphs (number field in first line, first line set to -.5 or something, first line is blank, first page is blank), if the paragraphs on each page were separated with manual line breaks until the last line.

Just a theory — have no idea how you’d automate the breaks.

I don’t know how you’d automate it, but there is a line number feature in Word, used for legal documents. If all of the text on one page was in one paragraph (soft line breaks until the hard one at the end of the page), theoretically Word would automatically number your pages in the margin.

Would probably require an extra blank line at the beginning of the page (paragraph), and in fact probably also a blank first page, or else the number would line up with the first line of the page rather than the last.

Not sure I’ve got this correctly thought thru…

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