My wife was once working on a document and trying to get Microsoft Word to do something.\u00a0 She asked me for help and I said, “Give me a minute to think.\u00a0 There’s nothing we can think of to make Word do that someone hasn’t already thought up.”\u00a0 And we figured it out.<\/p>\n
I should have taken my own advice and spent some time thinking about what to do about all of the occurrences of obersturmbannf\u00fchrer<\/em> and other long German nouns in this thriller I’m preparing for print.\u00a0 You see, because the lines are fully justified, and because Word didn’t recognize the German terms, I was getting lines with large spaces in them when terms like obersturmbannf\u00fchrer<\/em> were pushed to the next line.\u00a0 I tried manually hyphenating the terms in the worst cases, but the truth is that I have to use this file for different purposes and I think those manual hyphens will come back to haunt me.<\/p>\n Then I discovered the “optional hyphen.”\u00a0 Visible only when Word needs to use it, it always shows up when you use the Show\/Hide command to see all non-printing characters.\u00a0 By doing a global search and replace for obersturmbannf\u00fchrer<\/em> and making it ober-sturm-bann-f\u00fchrer<\/em> with each of those hyphens being optional hyphens (they look like a little, sideways L<\/em> in the program), as well as for other incredibly long German nouns, I was able to eliminate the spread-out sentences.<\/p>\n So, if you are self-publishing and using Word to prepare your book for publication, remember this important tool.<\/p>\n A.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My wife was once working on a document and trying to get Microsoft Word to do something.\u00a0 She asked me for help and I said, “Give me a minute to think.\u00a0 There’s nothing we can think of to make Word … Continue reading