April 2021 Newsletter

Upcoming webinar: Wrangling References and Corralling Citations in eXtyles

On Wednesday, July 21, join Jenny Seifert and Liz Blake  for a 2-hour online course covering all the ins and outs of working with references and citations in eXtyles! Suitable for both new and experienced eXtyles users and for all content types, this webinar will cover a wide variety of topics, including:

  • reprocessing references
  • adding new references and citations
  • citation renumbering
  • reference and citation warnings
  • … and more!

The registration fee for the course is $50, and captioned videos and chat transcripts will be available to registrants after the live session. We’ll include plenty of time for Q&A, so bring your questions and join the discussion!

Edifix news: Welcome to our new partner Xpublisher!

We’re delighted to welcome Xpublisher as an Edifix partner!

Xpublisher is a leading provider in multichannel publishing. The Xeditor and Xpublisher products simplify the creation, management, and publication of structured content, enabling the highly automated production of magazines, books, and technical documentation. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Munich, Germany, Xpublisher also operates in the United States and became part of the Fabasoft Group in 2019. Many leading international companies and organizations in aerospace, technology, education, publishing, public administration, and other industries rely on Xpublisher’s solutions. Using the Edifix API, Xpublisher provides access to Edifix via an integrated interface:

A reference list in Xeditor, showing Edifix markup as text shading in different colors

 

Zoomed-in view of a reference entry in Xeditor, showing markup tag names and the editing interface

What we’re reading: Preprints and pirouettes

In The Scientist, Jigisha Patel introduces ASAPbio’s recently completed project Preprints in the Public Eye and describes the project’s origins and information-gathering process. The outcomes of this project include guiding principles for preprint servers, researchers, institutions, and journalists, each of which can be downloaded as a full document or as an infographic summary.

From the infographic summary for preprint servers: “This project highlighted the need for noticeable labelling and clarity about the screening criteria used to determine what is posted on a preprint server.” We couldn’t agree more!

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In this guest column for Nature, researcher Aisling Roche describes how her experiences as a student of dance throughout her life have helped to make her a better scientist, both in academia and in her current job in private industry.

“The years I spent dancing in front of classmates and dance-studio mirrors was valuable preparation,” Dr. Roche writes. “There is no flawless first draft, and even the best work warrants tweaking by collaborators. Once you can overcome your initial defensiveness, you realize that getting feedback is a valuable, generative process and the only way to become a better scientist.”

You don’t have to be a dancer, a musician, or an artist to be a good scientist—or a good software developer—but it helps. ????

Community @ Atypon

Are you an Atypon customer or a close follower of industry tech? Our colleagues at Atypon have just announced new community initiatives, including a blog, a newsletter, and active discussion groups—and save the date for a community meeting on June 23!

To keep up with these developments, sign up for the Atypon Community Newsletter!

Find Inera at upcoming (online) conferences

Here’s where we’ll be this conference season! Keep up to date on our Events page.

NISO Preprints virtual conference

April 21

Bruce Rosenblum will be presenting a talk on the challenges of preprint citations.

JATS-Con 2021

April 27-29

Council of Science Editors 2021 Annual Meeting

May 3-5

Stop by our virtual exhibitor booth to say hello to Liz!

Bruce Rosenblum will be speaking on the panel Managing Information from Preprints: The Scholarly Record and the Public Need for Information (Especially during a Pandemic) on Monday, May 3.

Typefi Standards Symposium 2021

May 19 & 20

Bruce Rosenblum will be presenting an update on NISO STS; we’ll also share a standards-focused workflow demonstration..

Society for Scholarly Publishing 2021 Annual Meeting

May 24-27

Stop by our virtual exhibitor booth to say hello to Liz and Bruce!

Sylvia Izzo Hunter will be moderating the panel The Glass Ceiling You Don’t Know About Yet: Removing Barriers for People with Disabilities at Work on Monday, May 24. Also, catch our sponsored webinar Prevent “Citation Contamination”: Flag References to Predatory Journals with Edifix and Cabells on Tuesday, May 25!

15th European Association of Science Editors Conference

June 23-25

Balisage: The Markup Conference 2021

August 2-6

Attending one of these events? We’d love to see you—please contact us if you’d like to schedule a meeting.

Word tips: Unboxing text boxes using the Selection Pane

ℹ️ Our Word Tips are tested on recent versions of Word for Windows. If you are using Word for Mac, which has a smaller feature set, your mileage may vary.

Most of us have had at least one experience with a Word document that’s inexplicably full of text boxes. While authors often use text boxes only to mimic two-column layouts or to separate out special types of text—such as funding information or contact data for the corresponding author—sometimes a large proportion of content ends up in text boxes.

Screenshot: Word heading, "How's the weather?" The screenshot also shows 3 paragraphs of text: one is in an invisible text box, one is not in a text box, and one is in a text box with a blue border.

You want the text, but you don’t want the text boxes—especially if you plan to run this file through eXtyles and export XML, because anything trapped in a Word Drawing Object will not appear in the XML. That’s the kind of surprise nobody enjoys.

→ Did you know? Word’s “Drawing Objects” category—which includes text boxes as well as images and graphics—is not displayed in Draft View. If you switch to Draft View and big chunks of text disappear, that’s one way to know your file has a text box problem!

If you’re looking at a short file with just a few text boxes in it, it’s easy to scroll through and deal with them as they arise by cutting and pasting.

→ Bonus tip: If your cut-and-paste is unsuccessful, hit Undo and try again, but this time make sure you don’t catch the final paragraph mark.

If, on the other hand, your file contains many text boxes, and especially if some or all of them are hard to spot thanks to invisible borders, you need a better plan! That’s where the Selection Pane comes in.

To access the Selection Pane, choose Home > Editing > Select and click on Selection Pane in the resulting pop-up menu:

Screenshot: The pop-up menu with Selection Pane highlighted (hotkey: P)

You should now see a list of all the text boxes in your file (as well as any other Drawing Objects the file contains):

Screenshot: The Selection pane lists Text Box 1, Text Box 2, and Chart 2. The pane features Show All and Hide All buttons as well as up and down arrows.

Use this list to jump from box to box, cutting and pasting as you go, and to double-check your work at the end.

→ Bonus shortcut for handling two or more text boxes in sequence, with no intervening un-boxed text: You can use the Selection Pane to select and copy multiple text boxes, paste their contents into a Notepad or Wordpad file, then re-copy and re-paste into your Word file (and then delete the text boxes). When using this method, pay attention to face formatting in the boxed text, since Notepad will strip it out.

Have an intractable Word problem you’d love to solve? Have a clever tip to share? Send it to us at [email protected]!