Word query

[Dave2002]

The heading might just as well have been "Why I continue to hate MS Word" in most of its incarnations, and currently the Mac OS X versions (from 2011).

I was surprised to have an email very recently suggesting the use of emacs - which I thought was odd - but from someone who spends a lot of time using text editors it makes some sense. Most of us don't, just as most of us don't have the particular problems I'm currently faced with - editing, including finding and selecting sections of text in very large documents.

OK - one can start at the start of the section to deal with, and then scroll through to the end, and if nothing goes wrong, then maybe the operation required can be carried out. Sometimes this goes wrong, and has to be repeated several times.

In earlier editors, such as vi, I would have put the word START at the beginning of the section to deal with, and the word END at the end, and some fairly simple command could isolate all the text between START and END.

Another approach would be to use line numbers to select a text region.

I did find out how to get line numbers turned on in Word, but is there a comment to select all the text between (say) Line 1027 and line 24768? If there is, I can't find it. Searches using Google suggest ways to number sections - which is not what I want. I want to number the whole document, then find sections by numbers.

So, I looked for another way. There is a Sidebar which can be turned on, and this can be used to navigate more quickly through many pages - View-> Sidebar - then select Document Map Pane - though it's still slower than simply jumping to a known line number. The problem is that it doesn't seem to be possible to select pages within the sidebar, so it's still useless.

There have been a number of tasks such as this which I've encountered over the years which do make me really hate WYSIWYG interfaces, and wondering whatever happened to all the useful features of tools such as vi and emacs which made things like this so much easier with large scale documentation.

I wished I could start 2017 on a more positive note, but unfortunately I can't. There are hundreds of pages to be processed in the next few days, and "just doing it" by tedious scrolling may turn out to be the only way, and give us repetitive strain injuries.

Does anyone know any ways of doing what I'm requesting, arcane or otherwise? Maybe Office 365 will do this - though I'm not keen, but it might solve the problem.

[Dave2002]

I now have a partial solution to the problem mentioned in the previous post. It's not perfect, but solves some of the problems.
This description relates to the Mac version from 2011.

It relies on the use of headings, and different views of the document.

Headings (Level 1) are put into the document around the section to be processed.
It is possible that headings already exist if the document has been created with headings etc.

The display has to be put into Outline format, which should show headings in a side panel.

Above the text area, there should be a Show box, which shows which levels in the text are being displayed.

Set this to Level 1, and only the Level 1 headings will then appear. It is now possible to select one or more of those headings,
together with their associated text. Selected text is from each heading up to the next one - a little experimentation can check this out.

Then the wished for operation - copy, delete, word count, move text etc. can be done on the selected sections.
This can be done without seeing the whole document again, but if assurance is wanted that the correct sections have been
selected, then set the Show manu to show All Levels, which should then show the document, together with the selected section(s) highlighted.

Obviously if fragments of text (possibly large) are needed for selection, which don't already have Level 1 headings, these have to be inserted, and then removed later once the processing has been done, assuming that such "headings" have no meaning within the text and are unwanted.

If in doubt, make sure that copies of the original unedited document are kept until the final version has been created and checked to be satisfactory.
Some people may rely on Time Machine - we've mentioned that elsewhere - with various views. Use it, but don't rely on it absolutely.

Perhaps many people will not have thought of using Outline view, and will not have noticed this possibility. It's still not as powerful as what I was used to in vi(m), but it's a lot better than trying to do things by scrolling through pages and pages of text using mouse movements or key strokes.

Jumping around between sections is also helped (possibly a lot) by the use of the Sidebar containing the Document Map Pane, though not that this does not allow text selection within that pane, as mentioned in msg 1 above.

[Anastasius]

I think that your problem is that you are using the wrong type of software for the task in hand. Word is for processing words. With a document of 100 pages + you really need some sort of document management software...something like Documentum although I don't know if there is a Mac version.

[Dave2002]

I do agree with the diagnosis, though it's not just me. I have friends who use/d TeX and LaTeX, and so did I at one time, and before that nroff.
Nowadays I tend to use OpenOffice, though I'm not sure that's much better than Word for the particular type of task mentioned.

I did try Scrivener, but I didn't find that a great help either - https://www.literatureandlatte.com/trial.php

I suspect that Word can do the particular task required, but there are ways of getting the job done. Many of the help files and documents explaining "how to use Word" are written from the point of view of creating smallish documents. There are ways of beating Word into submission, though sometimes bugs or features which seem to have been embedded for ever make their appearance, and necessitate work arounds.

I think Documentum is a large software product, probably expensive, and perhaps overkill for documents which are perhaps relatively infrequently needed.

A partial solution using Word would be to break the document in to sections, and to edit each section as a separate file. I think there are ways of then getting Word to link all the sections together, though perhaps the particular methods do vary with OS and version of the Word software.

I would probably be able to do a similar job with Word myself, but other people would find it difficult. That's the problem.

For a large document I'd either make it work with Word (somehow) or revert back to LaTeX - which would be an impossible option for most other people.

For the moment the partial solutions I've found may make the task feasible.

[Anastasius]

You really are getting confused here between different types of programs. LaTeX is a document management program. It is NOT a WYSIWYG like Word. So trying to get a WYSIWYG program to handle 100+ pages is simply asking too much - as you have found- and that statement is validated by the simple fact that you can get Word to handle your document if you split it up into smaller chunks.

[Dave2002]

Sorry - I am not confused. I know that LaTeX is not WYSIWYG - though there are tools which work with LaTeX and TeX which provide some WYSIWYG features. I'm not sure what the current flavours are - there used to be one called Blue Sky which some people liked.
[BlueSky seems to have evaporated - http://tex.stackexchange.com/questio...uesky-research Textures may also have gone. Currently LyX seems still to be available - https://www.lyx.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyX - there may be others ... such as TeX Live, MiKTeX, Overleaf, TeXmacs, TeXnicCenter, Kile]

I would not recommend anyone learning or using LaTeX or TeX unless they have a serious need, which is most likely to arise for mathematicians, but some physicists and chemists also find it useful. Novelists and other people would probably hate them and not find these at all useful.

Many students have written theses and dissertations using tools like Word. Although they may not have been perfect, this demonstrates that Word and similar tools can be used. Alternative tools are perhaps not available - or at prices which domestic users, students and academics can afford. I have seen many documents in excess of 100 pages which were probably written using Word.

For some applications CMS (Content Management Systems) are useful, but such software is more likely to be found in large organisations, such as news media companies, where rapid access to text fragments for inclusion in new text is a desirable feature.

Thanks for commenting though. Currently I have worked out semi-automatic ways of getting word count profiles for sections within a large document using Word and Excel. It would be better to have the whole thing automated, but many people, if they are in the situation of having to write largish documents at all, will probably only have to do it a few times in their lives, so partial automation is arguably good enough - even if a bit painful, and it requires figuring out how to do it.

[Dave2002]

I've checked out various methods. Microsoft seem to still be claiming that Word will do this kind of job. There seem to be many users who disagree. The methods based on splitting the file into separate files and then including them back using Master Documents seem to have been down played, and no longer feature in much of the documentation. Further investigation suggests that some users who used, or possibly knew how to do this, gradually found that they couldn't any more - perhaps due to changes, or maybe it became too complex. Overall those people who persevered now seem generally to recommend that it's too unreliable a process (perhaps due to poor software ...) so not really viable.

I went back to a tool which I have tried before - Scrivener - https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
I may come back with suggestions for reviews of this tool. It also seems that there is now an iOS version for tablets.

There is a bit of a learning curve with Scrivener - perhaps a minimum of 4 hours, and probably it would take some days to become really proficient.
Rather like earlier markup systems, Nroff, Troff, TeX, LaTeX there is a compile process - but it's very quick. Particular problems might relate to including images
which may need careful tweaking to get the sizes right to match the text and the pages, but I think with experience those can be overcome.

Being able to make changes in sections, take snapshots, and then revert back if wanted later - possibly much later - seem really helpful.

The generated output files can be PDF, Word files, or text or for some other WPs. Ideally one should work in Scrivener for as long as possible, before outputting to another form for (possible) further layout and text tweaking. The best approach - if it could be achieved - would be to avoid any final tweaking in any WP at all, otherwise there would almost inevitably be a "I'll just make one more change" situation - and decisions about whether the change should be in the Scrivener environment or WP environment would have to be made. Keeping all changes in Scrivener would avoid problems, if that could be achieved.