Wordman’s
Production
Corner
By Dick Eassom, AF.APMP
Three Word Tricks
...Fractions, Diacritics, and Gibberish
The Problems
The first trick was inspired by the Office Challenge in TechRepublic (http://www.techrepublic.com/):
“Why does Word convert some fractions but not others?” I’ll tell you why and how to expand that
function.
Secondly, I’ll explain how you can easily enter diacritics (also known as accents) while you’re typing
some non-English words. For example, how do you quickly type “résumé”?
And finally, I’ll show you how to insert dummy text into a document when you’re mocking up a
template. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…
The Solutions
Fractions
When you type 1/2 followed by, say, a space, Word quickly converts the three fraction characters
into a single ½ character. This is controlled by a setting in the Word Options dialog. Click the Office
Button, and then Word Options. In the Word Options dialog, click Proofing and then AutoCorrect
Options. Select the AutoFormat As You Type tab in the AutoCorrect dialog:
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Check Fractions (1/2) with fraction character (½).
Note that like any other AutoFormat As You Type option, you can press Ctrl+Z immediately after
Word performs the automatic formatting to undo it.
This only works with ¼, ½, and ¾, since these characters are the only fractions defined in
Microsoft’s Windows-1252 code page, the legacy character encoding of the Latin alphabet found in
most western European languages.
Here we must dive into the history of character encoding. I will make this a shallow dive and try to
explain it as simply as possible! In the beginning there was ASCII (the American Standard Code
for Information Interchange), which defined the standard alphanumeric characters and some (now
almost redundant) control codes, such as tab. This only required codes from 0 to 127, i.e., 7 bits.
Nice and compact. Since computers use bytes (8 bits), characters from 0 to 255 are possible, and
so many early personal computers, e.g., the Tandy TRS-80 (my first computer), used characters
128–255 for graphics, non-English characters, such as é, or special characters such as smiley
faces. This became known as “extended ASCII.”
When IBM introduced the original PC, they produced different extended ASCII character sets for
different languages. PCs sold in the USA and Canada had a character set, called a “code page,”
that included characters needed for French, German, and other European languages, as well as the
characters that allowed you to create lines for boxes. If you wanted to use Greek characters, you
were out of luck unless you had the Symbol font, where, for example, D was replaced by Δ. If you
sent someone a document and they didn’t have the Symbol font loaded on their PC, all they saw
were Latin characters. However, IBM PCs sold in the Greek market had a different code page that
included the Greek characters. Confused yet? Hang in there, I’m nearly done…
The International Standards Organization (ISO) released ISO 8859 with its own set of character sets, the most popular of which was ISO 8859-1, or “ISO Latin 1,” which covered the western
European languages. ISO 8859-5 covered the Cyrillic alphabet, for example. However, ISO 88591 did not define any characters in the range from 128–159, and many proprietary character sets
had included characters in that range. So Microsoft created Code Page 1252 as a superset of
ISO 8859-1. Windows-1252 became the standard character encoding system used by all western
European versions of Windows, and most Internet standards. Code Page 1251 represented Cyrillic.
But, if you didn’t specify that you were using Code Page 1251, your Russian would look like random
Latin characters, since most systems default to Code Page 1252.
“All well and good, Wordman,” I hear you say, “but what has this to do with fractions”? Wait, I’m
getting there…
The final part of my story concerns Unicode, a universal system for encoding all the characters used
by all world languages. By using two or more bytes, the Unicode standard can theoretically support
more than a million different characters, and Microsoft Windows has supported Unicode since the
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days of Windows NT. All current operating systems (Windows 7, Mac OS X, etc.) use Unicode as
their default character encoding standard. Simply put, we can now easily represent any character
from almost all the modern languages through Unicode.
Well, that was almost my final point. Just because Unicode defines a code for a certain character
in a certain language, does not guarantee that the font face you’re using knows how to represent it.
Whereas Arial can represent an Arabic aleph, Arial Black cannot.
Back to fractions. Now you have a basic understanding, hopefully, of the history and evolving standards of character representation in computers, I can tell you that Unicode defines other fraction
characters beyond the ones mentioned above. To get to them, go to the Insert tab on the ribbon in
Word, and in the Symbols group, click Symbol > More Symbols:
I’ve selected the ¼ symbol, and, as you can see from the screenshot, this character is part of the
Latin-1 Supplement subset of characters. There are several choices for how we can enter this symbol into our Word document:
1. AutoFormat: enter 1/4, which Word will autoformat to ¼ , as described above.
2. Insert Symbol: select the character, and then click Insert from the Symbol dialog.
3. Alt Shortcut: enter Alt+0188, i.e. press and hold down the Alt key, and then type 0, 1, 8 and 8
on your numeric keypad.
4. Unicode Shortcut: type 00BC, then character’s Unicode, and then press Alt+X. (Note that
selecting a character in your text, then pressing Alt+X toggles between the character and its
Unicode.)
So where are these other fractions? In the Symbol dialog, click the Subset dropdown list and scroll
down to Number Forms:
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As you can see, there are characters for 1/3, 2/3, 1/8, 3/8, 5/8, and 7/8. Here are their Unicode
equivalents:
Fraction character
Unicode
⅓1/3
2153
⅔2/3
2154
⅛1/8
215B
⅜3/8
215C
⅝5/8
215D
⅞7/8
215E
Note that not every font face will be able to reproduce these characters: for example, whereas
they are reproduced correctly in Times New Roman and Arial, the ⅓ and ⅔ characters are not in,
say, Tahoma. Knowing the Unicodes, you can easily enter these fractions when you need them.
However, if you select ⅓ and click AutoCorrect, you can get Word to automatically replace, say, 1/3
with a ⅓ character:
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Word will automatically insert the ⅓ character in the With box, so all you need to do is to enter 1/3
in the Replace box next to it. Select Plain text in the options above so that the character you inserted will assume the font your text is in, and then click OK. You can repeat this for the other fractions
listed above.
For fractions that don’t have Unicode characters, you can use superscript and subscript, for example: 99/100. Remember the shortcut key combinations:
•
Superscript: Ctrl+Shift+=
•
Subscript: Ctrl+=
Diacritics
A diacritic is an accent or other mark (or “ancillary glyph”) added to a letter (or “basic glyph”) to
change the sound of that letter. The Unicode system described above allows virtually every combination of letter and diacritic used in modern languages.
The Windows-1252 code page included all these combinations used in the western European languages, and Word has always given us a shortcut key for the most common of these on the US
keyboard layout (it will vary for non-US keyboard layouts). For example, to type é, press Ctrl+’, then
e. Here’s a table of the diacritics, their shortcuts, and which letters the shortcut work with:
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Diacritic
Acute accent
Grave accent
Shortcut
Circumflex
Tilde
Diaresis/Umlaut
Cedilla
Diphthong
Ring above
Caron
Stroke
Crl+^
Ctrl+’
Ctrl+‘
Ctrl+~
Ctrl+:
Ctrl+,
Ctrl+&
Ctrl+@
Alt+Ctrl+^
Ctrl+/
Works for
áÁéÉíÍóÓúÚýÝ
àÀèÈìÌòÒùÙ
(with d, produces eth: ð Ð)
âÂêÊîÎôÔûÛ
ãÃñÑõÕ
äÄëËïÏöÖuÜÿŸ
çÇ
æÆœŒ
åÅ
šŠ
øØ
(with c, produces cent, ¢)
If you need a letter and diacritic combination that is not in this table, you can go to Symbol > More
Symbols on the Insert tab of the ribbon, and find them there.
Gibberish
When you’re setting up a new proposal or other document template, it’s useful to be able to insert
some dummy text to see what your page layout will look like. Word has always included this feature
but to use it, go to Office Button > Word Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options and make
sure that Replace text as you type is checked in the AutoCorrect dialog:
To insert random text, type =rand() and press Enter. In Word 2003 or earlier, you’ll get three, threesentence paragraphs of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” (PCs set to different languages produce different text, of course. If your PC’s default language is German, you should get
“Franz jagt im komplett verwahrlosten Taxi quer durch Bayern.”)
You could control the number of paragraphs and sentences by typing =rand(x,y), where x is the
number of paragraphs (maximum 200) and y is the number of sentences per paragraph, or just
=rand(x) to get x three-sentence paragraphs.
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This was useful if you needed text containing every letter of the English alphabet, but was not very
exciting, and could lead to some odd pagination. With Word 2007 onwards, this function creates text
from Word’s help files, e.g. “On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document.” Much better, but the whole point of dummy text is to
show document layout and pagination without the text distracting the viewer. If you need to insert
the old “Quick brown fox” text in Word 2007/2010, you can type =rand.old(x,y).
However, a better solution is to use the =lorem(x,y) function. This produces the well know fake
Latin, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.” This is ideal for showing what a
document will look like when full of text, etc., but not distract the viewer with the actual text.
One More Thing
As I’ve been discussing ways of inserting stuff into Word, here’s some miscellaneous shortcuts that
you might find useful:
Character Name
Inverted question mark
Inverted exclamation
mark
Eszett
Trademark
Registered trademark
Copyright
Char
¿
¡
ß
™
®
©
Shortcut
Alt+Crl+?
Alt+Ctrl+!
Ctrl+&, then
s
Alt+Ctrl+t
Alt+Ctrl+r
Alt+Ctrl+c
Summary
I will be offering a pre-conference Microsoft Word workshop at the APMP Annual Conference in
Denver on Tuesday, 31 May 2011. This will be an eight-hour, structured seminar on using Word
2007 for proposal development. Attendees get a copy of Wordman’s Ribbon, an add-in for Word
20007/2010, and three APMP CEUs. The pricing is yet to be finalized, but if you are interested,
please contact me at the address below.
I am also offering this as a one-day, in-house Wordman training seminar on Word 2007 for Proposal
Development teams. If your organization is interested in specialized Microsoft Word training, please
contact me at the email address below, or visit my Website: www.iamwordman.com.
You can reach Wordman via Dick Eassom, AF.APMP, sole proprietor of Wordman, providing Specialist
Microsoft Word Training for Proposal Professionals, at [email protected]. Wordman is ©2001–2011,
Dick Eassom, and used with permission by APMP. Thanks to Sean Jones (www.knitestudios.com) for
the Wordman artwork. I thought I’d use Sean’s original “2D” Wordman image in this article for a bit
of nostalgia!
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