Word Processing - Hyphenate and be dashed

The grammatical use of hyphens is either a sort of marriage ceremony between pairs of words such as five-pound, year-old, high-heeled, clarifying meaning; or a divorce that clarifies pronunciation: co-operative, re-enter. You've probably found that there's some disagreement between Word's spelling and grammar checkers on this. If you type something such as "news-stand", for example, the subsequent game of "proofing ping-pong", though initially amusing, rapidly becomes tediously recursive.

EASIER READING

Hyphens also serve a typographical purpose. Text set in multiple columns can often have poor "colour" or visual density, especially with narrow columns and large character size. If the text is left-aligned, then line lengths will be very uneven. If the text is justified - that is, aligned to both margins - then large spaces may appear in the middle of lines, or worse still, "rivers" of white space meander down the column. Careful use of hyphens can rectify this. Most word processors have the means to add cosmetic hyphens automatically, as and when needed. In Word, this feature is tucked away in the Tools, Language sub-menu. Digging into the options, you can limit the number of consecutive lines ending in a hyphen, stop words in all-uppercase being hyphenated, and specify the width of the hyphenation zone. The latter trades off the frequency of hyphens against the variation in line length. The lower the value, the more hyphens; the higher the value, the more ragged the line-endings.

If you want to retain control over hyphenation, or only hyphenate part of a document, choose the Manual button. This will not only prompt you for confirmation for each word that is to be hyphenated, but will also give you a choice of where it is to be hyphenated, avoiding potential embarrassment with awkward words such as Penistone (an obscure town in Yorkshire) or Arsenal (an obscure football club in London).

SPECIAL HYPHENS

There are times, however, when you want to use a hyphen that never breaks over two lines, and I'm grateful to our Perugian correspondent, Bob Monroe, for the following. Non-breaking hyphens (Ctrl+Shift+-) and spaces (Ctrl+Shift+space) are useful for things such as phone numbers, which you don't want split over two lines. In Word 6, a non-breaking hyphen looks like an ordinary hyphen unless you check the "Show optional hyphens" box from the Tools, Options, View tab, in which case it becomes longer and higher. For mysterious reasons, the non-breaking hyphen shows as a wide, blank space in Word 97 unless you enable "Show tab characters" from the same dialogue. This has the downside of showing all your tabs as well.

If you don't want to avail yourself of auto-hyphenation, then optional hyphens (Ctrl+-) are useful for breaking up long words. Should the word fall at the end of a line, causing uneven length, it will be broken at the optional hyphen. Should it not, then no hyphen appears. These appear as an L on its side if you choose to show them as described.

Very rarely, if a line with an optional hyphen showing is tightly packed, this can have the unnerving effect of pushing the bottom line of text off the page into oblivion as far as What You See is concerned. What You Get, thankfully, is unaffected.

QUICK WORD TIPS

- If you click on a tab, margin stop or table division in the Word ruler with both mouse buttons (or Alt+left button) you get dimensioned arrows showing the exact position of the stop. This works with margins, tables and headers/footers in the vertical ruler, too.

- If you hit Shift+F3 in Word, any selected text will be toggled between ALL CAPITALS, all lower case or All Initial Capitals.

FRENCH CONNECTION

Bob Reksten of Monaco is looking for a word-processing "plug-in". He says: "Sometimes I can't remember a word in English when I know it in French and at other times it's the other way around. What I would like to find is a translation dictionary and thesaurus package. When typing a word, I'd like to hit a button, choose a language, then ask for a correction, a synonym or a translation." Does anybody know of such a thing?

PCW DETAILS

Tim Nott can be contacted by post via the PCW editorial office (address, p10) or email wp@pcw.co.uk.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Q: How can I get Word to left and right align text on the same line? It was easy enough to do this - say for a price list or contents page - on my old Amstrad PCW, and also in WordPerfect, but I can only left, right or centre an entire line in Word.

Leslie Caton

A: It's possible, but a little more fiddly. There are two ways: first you can set right-aligned and centred tabs. Make sure the ruler is visible and click on the small button on the left to cycle between the choices. An L shape is a left tab, a mirrored L a right tab, and an inverted T a centred tab, and with a dot it becomes a decimal tab, which aligns figures around their decimal point. Click anywhere on the ruler to set the tab - you can then drag them into position or remove them by dragging down off the ruler. The second, and more flexible way is to use a table, as you can change the alignment of each column or even each cell. This also makes it easy to format the text in each column, say if you want your items in roman and the prices in italic. However, if you want leaders (rows of dots or dashes between the left- and right-aligned items) you'll need to use tabs and format them from the Format, Paragraph, Tabs dialog.

Q: I have tried to copy formulas while using tables in Microsoft Word but the program copies the cell result instead of the formula. Please advise me whether it is possible. If not, what steps are you taking to facilitate this feature?

Dr Edward Tiagha

A: I've tried doing this and it seems what is happen-ing is that the formula is being copied but it isn't being recalculated.

Highlight the cell, row or entire table and press F9 - that will update the results of the formula. You can check by switching between seeing the formulae and their results. To do this, turn field codes on and off, either from Tools, Options, View or by using the Alt+F9 keyboard shortcut.

Q: Word 97 seems to have an annoying habit of occasionally putting footnotes on the following page, even when the reference is only halfway down the current page. I have met others who have suffered this problem but cannot find any fix. Do you have any suggestions?

Tony Milner

A: This is a problem which Microsoft has confirmed and is researching.

However, as the company admits it goes right back to version 2, don't hold your breath. Basically it's due to lack of space and there are various workarounds. In Word 97 you can turn-off Printer metrics from Tools, Options, Compatibility. On all versions you can try decreasing the point size and line spacing of the footnote text style from Format, Styles. You can also reduce the line spacing/point size of the body text, reduce the size of the page margins, or reduce the line spacing of the footnote separator by going to View, Normal followed by View, Footnotes. Select Footnote Separator from the droplist, then highlight the separator in the pane below. Then set Format, Paragraph, Spacing to a lower value.