Ben Michael Ward is a Web Developer in San Francisco.

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Microsoft Word vs. Ben

Here I am writing up my final report and Word is doing everything in its power to frustrate me. One of the most irritating of its features is related to hung quotes (the use of which Stevie’s typography quest got me into and and I now respond to indented quotes in my documents with faux choking).

Basically, Word was happy with my unordered list style, but refused to automatically hang numbered lists. Each time I select the style I’d have to drag the number back out into the margin. Minor annoyance. Except that when I choose restart numbering for subsequent lists, Word will immediately revert to the default indentation. So I scroll up again and drag each list back in to place.

Then, just now, I restarted numbering on a numbered list again and all my unordered, bulleted lists jumped. The bullet sits in the margin, but the text is a centimetre indented.

I swear, it’s going to be easier to write the final report in HTML.

Oh, just in case anyone is ready to get pedantic on any terminology; I know my typography lexicon sucks.

Update: And, as if by magic here the creators of CSS write about styling for print. Eerie, eh?

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6 Responses to “Microsoft Word vs. Ben”

  1. Comment by Adam McArdle

    November 19th, 2005 at 9:55 pm

    “I swear, its going to be easier to write the final report in HTML.”

    To be honest, it would be easier writing it in binary!

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  2. Comment by Ben

    November 19th, 2005 at 10:04 pm

    Perhaps I seem to recall that Fatty wrote his final report in LaTex (or however the capitalisation is). I have no experience with it at all. Perhaps in the time between finishing this report and starting the final report I’ll convert it to something less volatile than Word.

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  3. Comment by Ben O’Neill

    November 20th, 2005 at 11:43 pm

    I use latex (see, note the coolness of using latex commands in my comment, haha. sigh.). It’s quite easy to use even for someone that’s never used it (assuming you find a style you like). I’ve never actually made my own style from scratch…

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  4. Comment by Ben

    November 21st, 2005 at 2:19 pm

    I’m genuinely starting to think that HTML+CSS is the way to go with this. with Firefox 1.5 supporting CSS counters for generated content, it covers common presentation like automatic heading numbering, the block level structure for lists is vastly superior to Word’s styling system and a script to automatically generate a table of contents and table of figures based on heading levels and/or class names would be a doddle.

    I’ll do a proper assessment of it when my coursework burden is cleared for Christmas. I suspect it will boil down to the level of support I can find for print specific CSS (page breaks and stuff).

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  5. Comment by Jimmy Rutter

    November 25th, 2005 at 10:18 am

    Long time, no see!

    I see you are working hard at your project. Thankfully I can slide along here in work doing nothing without worrying about my project anymore.

    Unfortunately it means getting up at 6 AM each morning … I wish I was back at uni so much!

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  6. Comment by Ben

    November 29th, 2005 at 10:03 pm

    6am? Crickey Jim that’s a touch extreme. I’d probably take grief with MS Word over that. Probably.

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