Quotation Marks, Symbols, Inline Text, and Word Counts

Quotation Marks, Symbols, Inline Text, and Word Counts

This section covers how to get those necessary, non-standard characters into your documents.

Word Count Setup and Procedures

Doing a Word or Character Count of a Document or Paragraph

Choose File > Properties and click the Statistics tab. The number of words, characters, paragraphs, and other items in the document are displayed.

Figure 6-15. Counting words, characters, and other document components

To count a subset of your document, you'll need to copy and paste the paragraph or other subset into a different document, and choose File > Properties again.

Specifying Characters That Affect Counts

Choose File > Properties and click the Statistics tab. The window is shown in Figure 6-16.

• If you want words containing slashes , dashes, and so on to be counted as separate words, enter the relevant character in the Separator field. This ensures that combined words such as Smith/Owens or Smith&Owens are counted as two words.

• You can also enter special characters and non-printable characters so that any ASCII hexadecimal code in your document will be read correctly.

• Special characters such as \n (line feed) and \t (tab) are also supported.

Figure 6-16. Specifying characters for special treatment

Setting Up Quotation Marks

The most common use of this feature is to control the type of quotation marks used in a document. More specifically , use this feature to switch back and forth between using straight quotes and curly quotes (called "smart quotes" in other applications).

This feature also lets you substitute single and double quotes with any other characters you want.

1. With a document of some type open, choose Tools > AutoCorrect. (With a text or HTML document open , the menu item is AutoCorrect/AutoFormat.)

2. In the AutoCorrect window, select the Custom Quotes tab.

3. Set the options for using quotes. Use Figure 6-17 for guidance.

   Figure 6-17. Setting quote options

   

4. Click OK.

Inserting the Symbol, Accents Marks, and Hundreds of Other Special Characters

Not only does the program have the new Asian language support, it has special characters enough to satisfy any appetite or document needs. Plus the usual basics like and .

1. Choose Insert > Special Character. The window is shown in Figure 6-18.

   Figure 6-18. The Special Characters window

   

2. Select the font if you want to specify the formatting, but you can change it once you put it in the document, The font matters only for things like WingDings, where the characters really do change based on the font.

3. Either select a subset, or just scroll through. The item you select in the Subset field just moves you to the beginning of that set in the scrolling window; it doesn't show you a whole different set of characters.

   Note

   If you commonly use a word with a special character, such as a product name with a trademark symbol, you can set up an AutoText entry for it. See Creating AutoText Entries on page 180.

4. Select one or more characters to insert. If you click on , then on , before clicking Insert, both will be inserted in the document. Which is only a benefit, not a drawback, since of course you can delete anything you don't want. The window is shown in Figure 6-19.

   Figure 6-19. Setting quote options

   

5. Click OK; the characters will appear in your document.

   

Adding In-Line Explanatory Text for a Word or Phrase

Ruby text allows you to add explanatory text next to complex Asian characters. Choose Format > Ruby and enter the base text (the Asian characters) and the corresponding explanatory text.

This is also useful if you anticipate an audience whose native language is not the document's language, or if your document contains many technical terms that your audience will appreciate reminders of their meanings.

To insert text, follow these steps.

1. Chose Format > Ruby. The window is shown in Figure 6-20.

   Figure 6-20. Setting up explanatory Ruby text

   

2. Enter the complex text in the first field in the left column, and the explanatory text in the right column. Beneath the columns , specify how to format the explanatory text.

3. Click OK. The phrase and explanation will be inserted in the document.

Click Apply; the text and explanation will appear in your text, as shown in Figure 6-21. The formatting of the Ruby text depends on your formatting selections.

Figure 6-21. Ruby text, used here to add inline text explanation of technical term