Information for using Equation fields



Using WORD for Technical Writing

Word is a reasonably good environment for technical writing, as will be evident below. The problem is that it is not a common use of the program, so a significant amount of set-up and fighting of defaults is required. The description of the capabilities and their use is the goal of this document. I will begin with a brief description of how to set Word up, then move on to a series of how-to’s, and finally repeat a ‘cheat sheet’ for equation field use.

Word Set-Up

Normal

You may have noticed the (default) Normal style in a toolbar in word. This holds document defaults (as expected) and also the menu and toolbar set-up (which you may not expect). This rather nice feature allows you to set up word one place the way you like it, then copy the ‘Normal’ file into other computers for use there. Word specialists may argue that you can have another style handle this, but it is easier to redefine normal. Set up as below, then look for a file named ‘normal’ in the templates folder in the office folder (at least that is where it is on mine). Copy it and paste into the same place on another machine to get that one straightened out.

Ruler

Turn the ruler on in the ‘view’ menu, if it isn’t there already. This useful ruler at the top of the document shows you the typing area, tabs, indents, and line length. You can add them and adjust them. Note especially the centering tab, good for equations, and the tab that fixes the rightmost side of the text, good for equation numbers. In most recent versions, pushing the button on the left side lets you choose what to insert with a click in the ruler. Drag unwanted items off the ruler to get rid of them, or use delete. It only adjusts for the selected paragraphs. Don’t try to adjust the margins here. Use the Format document menu for that. As for page numbers, get them in the toolbar that pops up when you choose view/header and footer.

Track Changes

This option under the tools menu is self-explanatory, but a useful feature when co-authors are involved: use suggested.

A problem with track changes is with Word's endnotes and particularly cross-references to those endnotes. When you move a reference (by drag and drop editing) when track changes is on, the old one does not go away, so the cross-references still point at the old one, and become undefined when changes are accepted. If track changes is off, and drag and drop editing is used, the cross references correctly follow the endnote. (Cut and paste does not work, since the cross references become undefined after the cut). The work-around is to turn off track changes, do the editing, and use 'compare documents' (menu item near track changes) between the final document and the original after all editing is done. This creates a document similar to that if track changes had been on the entire time.

Toolbars, Keyboard and Menus

Use view/toolbars to select the toolbars you will need, I use standard, formatting, and drawing. Under the ‘tools’ menu is the ‘customize…’ menu item. Go there. You will get a dialog box with several tabs that depend upon the Word version. Normally you choose the ‘commands’ tab. Find the command that you want. Some versions allow choice of type of commands to speed the search (edit, insert, etc.). You will want at least (if they aren’t there already) the superscript and subscript (edit), the show paragraph and show field codes {a} from viewing, and the insert frame (often called ‘horizontal’ in recent versions, icon has a resemblance to the American flag). Drag the icons to get them in toolbars. Also drag for the menus (insert field may be done this way). There should be a button for ‘keyboard’. Use it if you want to do things fast and can remember a few keys. There are a few more notes on this below in the equations section.

Footnotes and Endnotes

Any technical paper ought to have references. The standard practice is to use endnotes. One can use an add-on, such as EndNote, which works well, or use Word’s built-in feature, which is required by several journal’s electronic submission procedures. In fact, you ought to go to the journal web site before writing (or at least before formatting) the paper to check this, as well as document templates, length restrictions, reference format, etc. Bibliographies are best handled by Zotero ()(hhallen 0ptics – with zero not oh), which is a Firefox extension. You also need to install the word processor plug-in. {To use the built-in endnote capability, go to insert/footnote…, then make sure you agree with everything in the dialog window (also go to options and set the numbering scheme). Once you insert one, the symbol appears and you get thrown to a sub-window to enter the bibliographic information. Do so. If you want to reference the same document again, use a cross reference. Go to insert/cross reference and you get a floating window in which you can choose the endnote that you wish to cross reference, set parameters (I find the hypertext that hops you to the original endnote each time you click on the cross reference very annoying – turn it off before you insert the cross reference). WARNING: do not cut and paste the original endnote after there is a cross reference to it. Instead, use drag-and-drop editing. The proper ordering of the endnotes will be handled by Word, but you run into troubles with ordering if your cross reference ends up significantly before the endnote. You may find it useful to know that the endnote and cross reference entries are styles, so you can do such things as making all the endnote numbers in the text superscripts (or not) by editing the style. This saves effort and minimizes the chances of Word deciding to reapply the style and undo all of your work. *** Zotero handles these problems as well as endnote, and is free, which is why we should use it unless required not to by, e.g. the journal **}

I suggest we use Zotero () for this purpose. The benefit of it is that you can attach pdf's of the documents as well as a reference in a standard format. Even more, the database can be stored in the cloud so that it is automatically updated for each of us so that we do not have to send the database around. It works as a Firefox extension. Once you install it (in Firefox, go to , choose 'download, a red button,' on the left will be 'zotero for firefox,' and you can accept the add-o addition. You will also need to install the word processor plug-in. To use the cloud storage, you need to set up my log-in. After installation, Firefox will have 'zotero' in the lower left of the window (or choose 'view/toolbars/add-on toolbar'). Click on it, a lower window split will open (click again to close later). There is a 'gear' menu at the top of the zotero subwindow, click on it and choose 'preferences.' Choose the 'Sync' tab, and add username hhallen and password 0ptics – with zero not oh. You can now close the preferences. Use the DIAL_DOS folder for our stuff.

Fields

Almost all documents use fields. The page numbers are, many inserted items are, footnotes and endnotes are, the equation fields below are, so it is useful to know something about them. Do insert/field, which you should have added to the menu a few paragraphs ago (or perhaps defined a keystroke for, as I have). Scan the list of field types to see the power of these things. Many of these features used to be independently implemented, but the Microsoft computer scientists cleaned that up. You can hack all kinds of things with these. Figure captions and endnotes are two fields that keep track of their place in the document, and display a number to prove it. One can create a custom field that keeps track of equation numbers. I did once, and don’t recommend it.

One more warning

The conversions between different platforms are getting better, but one sticky point besides equation editor related stuff is the extended character sets. These are the characters you get when holding down the option key, and are not ascii. They are different on the PC. I don’t know about the Unix boxes. So the safest route is to use symbol font or use the Insert/symbol menu item in Word.

How to get your line drawing together

Suppose you use the drawing toolbar features to get a nice line-drawing with text boxes. Now you want to collect it to move it around, resize it, etc. First a hint: use big text and draw a big picture with thick lines and no tiny points. Also, use a sans-serif, constant line width (boring) font. These fonts are easy to read and stand up to photocopying, even with reduction. The big figure can be used in a talk. It is also easier to get the alignments you want. Finally, you can shrink it and the text together and still have the text big enough. Problems arise when the text gets too small and you fix it by changing the font size.

Once the drawing is there, use the arrow from the drawing menu to select the items (hopefully you learned to use this to move things around before). Once all are selected, group them with the pop-up draw menu from the button on the draw toolbar. If you have trouble resizing it as a group, cut it and paste-special as a picture. It might help. Do format object to set text flow around your picture.

How to keep a figure caption with a figure, and have text flow around them.

This is a common problem. I think the official solution may involve inserting Word figure captions, I have had some interesting experiences with them, such as Word insisting the text references to them be bold no matter how many times I re-format them, such as the entire caption being inserted into the text each time I try to make a reference, etc. I found the following solution easier, although you must keep the figure numbers correct manually.

Paste your figure into the text. Unfortunately, the default paste-in method is floating around the text rather than in-line, which we need. So … Do format object or format picture. Use the layout tab to make the thing in-line with the text. Type your figure number and caption in the lines under the figure. Select both the figure and caption (entire lines). Push the insert horizontal frame button you added above, or use the menu item that you added for this purpose. Figure and caption will pop into a frame. Set the location of the frame with the layout tab under format/frame (select the frame, not the figure inside it). You can resize the frame or do other things to it here. One nice feature is that you can reference the frame to left, right, top, middle or bottom. If the frame gets on the wrong page (there are troubles with too much text flowing paste a frame), then go to normal view, select the lines with the frame, and move them until they are between a couple of other paragraphs. The final thing you need to do is to get rid of the default border around the frame. The easiest way is to use the border select button of the format toolbar (select none).

How to Create equations using Equation fields

You can create mathematical formulas by using equation fields. They take less file space and are faster than trying to use the equation editor, which I hate, and are somewhat reminiscent of Tex in that it can all be done from the keyboard. The advantage over Tex is that one can get instant feedback as to what it looks like and re-editing -- with just one keystroke. The downside is that it has to be set up somewhat, and the codes have to be known. The end of this document is a converted version of an older (circa 1990) Mac version, which gives the codes and good examples. The codes with few examples can be found under ‘eq fields’ in Word help.

To insert an equation field one can use the Insert menu, for field, then (push tab to get to input area and) type (or choose from the list) eq to make it an equation field. It is faster to key-code the insert field menu item. Choose a key combination (I use command option backslash for historical reasons) and define it as "insert field". After EQ in the field, use backslashes with codes inside, like backslash f for a fraction -- /f(1,2). You need to do fancy stuff like superscripts later in edit mode, see below. To define a key, go to Customize in the tools menu, then choose the keyboard card, choose Insert in the category list, and Insertfield in the commands list, then set the new short cut to what you chose. A carriage return (or moused OK) get you out of the creation box and back to the document.

The field will either appear in an editable form (inside {}’s), or as it will look printed. Note that the selection color is different when editing inside a field. Now, how do we switch in and out of field editing mode? The answer is: it is arcane enough that Microsoft hasn’t pre-wired an easy way, so we have to define another key for ourselves (for mouse-only people, use the same procedure but modify the toolbar or menu rather than the keyboard card.). I defined the command-shift-j key to switch in and out of field editing mode in analogy to the old (circa 1997) Mac command-j, which now does the other half of what the old one used to. Go to Customize in the tools menu, then choose the keyboard card, choose view in the category list, and view field codes in the commands list, then set the new short cut to the key combination of your choice. This is actually quite nice -- the view field codes key toggles between viewing the equations and editing the fields. Don’t forget to make the equations italic – this is a standard format. Once you have an equation field, NEVER double click on it! Word will immediately and irreversibly (except for a quick ‘undo’) change it into an Equation Editor object, with all the inter-platform incompatible, memory hogging, slow properties inherent to such objects.

Using the Formula Entries

The following listings describe the content and display the effect of formula entries in this glossary. These are the things that you type in the field after the ‘eq’. Each entry consists of:

• A formula character (\) and a one-letter command identifier.

• Formatting options. Note that all possible formatting options are not used in any one formula glossary entry. You can use different options and change the option parameters. Formatting options can be in uppercase or lowercase letters.

• Text, numbers, and other characters to be printed in the formula, enclosed within parentheses. You must separate the items in parentheses with commas.

In the formula entry descriptions, the characters in bold and the parentheses enclosing arguments are required for the formula to be printed correctly. Words in all capital letters are “placeholder” arguments that you replace with your own information.

Depending on the font you use, some formulas may look a little different in your own documents than they do in this one. You can change the font of formula entries as you do with any other characters; however, do not change the Greek characters or other symbols in the Symbol font.

Formula Entry Descriptions

Abs (absolute value)

This entry: Is printed like this:

\B\bc\|(REPLACE)

Example:

\B\bc\|(4x + 20)

Array

This entry: Is printed like this:

\A\al\hs5\co1(LIST,ARRAY,HERE)

Example:

\A\al\hs7\co3(1,2,33,4,55,6,777,8,99)

In the formula glossary entry, \A is the formula command, and the following are formatting options:

\al Aligns columns left

\con Formats array in specified number of columns

\hsn Specifies spacing (in points) between columns

Backward

This entry: Is printed like this:

\D\ba5()REPLACE REPLACE

Example:

O\D\ba2()E OE

The option \ba decreases the specified amount of space (in points) between the preceding and next character. This command uses no arguments, but you must include the empty parentheses.

Box

This entry: Is printed like this:

\X(REPLACE)

Example:

\X(\A\al\co2\vs3\hs5(1,2,3,4))

You can nest other formulas within the box command. An array is nested in the sample.

The options \to, \bo, \le, and \ri draw the top, bottom, left, and right sides of the box, respectively. If no options are used, all sides of the box are drawn.

Brackets — br[

br{, br ................
................

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