August 2017 Newsletter

eXtyles, Edifix, and industry updates from Inera.

 

XUG 2017: November 2 & 3, Cambridge, MA

Registration for XUG 2017 will open on August 23! Stay tuned for an announcement with a link to the registration page next week.

A limited number of rooms at the Sheraton Commander are
available at a special group rate—but only until October 11, so reserve soon for the best deal!

We’ve had several responses to our survey on breakout table discussion topics—please weigh in if
you plan to attend XUG! Click here to vote on our suggested topics and/or propose your own!

In addition to the always lively Thursday XUG meeting, the Inera staff and our partners at Mulberry Technologies
will be offering four exciting courses on Friday, November 3:

  • eXtyles Export Workshop
    Jenny Seifert, IneraFocusing on the kinds of problems in Word documents that lead to XML errors, this course will empower you with an understanding of how eXtyles processes interact to produce XML from Word.
  • Word (and Excel!) Tips for Editors
    Elizabeth Blake & Bruce Rosenblum, IneraWe have refreshed our popular Word Tips for Editors course and added a brand new section with Excel tips, highlighting Excel features particularly helpful to those of us who spend our days editing Word files.
  • Just Enough JATS, BITS, and STS
    Tommie Usdin, Mulberry TechnologiesIf you are deciding whether, when, and how to adopt or convert to JATS, BITS, or STS, or if you want to know how they are organized and how they relate to each other, this is the course for you!
  • XPath: The Secret to Success with XSLT, XQuery, and Schematron
    Debbie Lapeyre, Mulberry TechnologiesA deeper knowledge of XPath is the key to fully empowering XML tools. This fast-paced, technical overview of XPath will cover tree terminology, the XPath data model, relative and absolute location paths, node tests, functions and operators, and short and long syntax. We will cover most of XPath 1.0, highlight key features of XPath 2.0, and introduce XPath 3.0.

For more details see the full XUG 2017 Course Descriptions. We look forward to seeing you there!

 

New on the eXtyles blog

In our latest post, learn how eXtyles has helped achieve reference accuracy rates well above the industry average for Inera customer Dustri-Verlag!

 

Inera @ Balisage

We’re all very proud of Inera’s Caitlin Gebhard and her very well received presentation at the Balisage pre-conference symposium Up-Translation and Up-Transformation: Tasks, Challenges, and Solutions on July 31. Curious? You can read Caitlin’s paper, “Finding the Tipping Point in Automated Markup During Up-Translation,” on the Balisage website, or check out her slides—and, of course, stay tuned for our Balisage highlights in the September newsletter!

 

Find Inera at upcoming conferences

International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication 2017

Chicago, IL, 10–12 September

Inera’s Elizabeth Blake will be exhibiting at this meeting, at which peer-reviewed research is presented on all aspects of the scientific publication process. If you’re planning to attend, please stop by Booth 5 to say hello!

Frankfurt Book Fair 2017

Frankfurt, Germany, 11–15 October

Inera’s Bruce Rosenblum and Robin Dunford will be at stand N84 in Hall 4.2 at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair! Bruce will also be giving a 30-minute HotSpot presentation on Thursday, October 12, at 1:00 pm: “Single-Source Publishing: from Word to XML and Beyond”!

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

 

Flashback to #SSP2017 …

Now available in the SSP Library, 2017 Annual Meeting sessions including keynotes, plenaries, and concurrent sessions—and watch for #FeaturedSessions on SSP’s social media.

 

Reminder: MEDLINE best practices

The National Library of Medicine reminds journals applying for inclusion in MEDLINE to follow the publishing best practices outlined by the following organizations:

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)

The Council of Science Editors (CSE)

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO), particularly PIE-J, the Recommended Practices for the Presentation and Identification of E-Journals

Inera also recommends reviewing your site for compliance with the PIE-J recommendations; most of these are common sense, but if you’ve never reviewed your site with PIE-J in hand, it’s a good idea!

 

Word Tip: Spike!

Word’s Spike function is basically a turbo-charged Cut & Paste. When you need to move material from several places in a document into one place, or from other documents into the one you’re working on, you could cut and paste the chunks of text, tables, images, etc., one at a time—but you can also save time by using Spike to collect them all before pasting! Here’s how.

First, select the first thing (word, sentence, paragraph, table…) you want to cut. (Important Note: Spike will cut, not copy! If you’re moving text from one document to another and need the original to stay put, you’ll want to save before Spiking, then exit without saving afterwards.)

Next, press Ctrl-F3 to add the cut material to your Spike (basically, a special clipboard). You can keep adding to that clipboard using Ctrl-F3, and instead of each new cut replacing the old one, they’ll all pile up together. Once you’ve got everything you need to paste, click where you want to paste it (a new Word file or somewhere in an existing Word file) and press Ctrl-Shift-F3. This pastes the contents of your Spike (everything you cut) and clears the Spike clipboard.

 

Epic Word Fails: Terrible tables

Here at Inera, we like to think we’ve seen all the ways Word and its users can fail one another—and then along comes another idiosyncratic Word file to prove us wrong. We thought you might enjoy hearing about some of these experiences (names changed to protect the guilty), spotted in the wild by Inera staff—and we hope you’ll contribute your own!

 

THE FAIL: Epic misuse of drawing tools

An Epic Word Fail we’ve all, alas, seen repeatedly over the years is the table apparently created without regard to the existence of Word’s table tools. This Fail comes in many forms, but a common instance is the use of Drawing tools (or sometimes paragraph borders), combined with tabs or ::shudder:: multiple spaces, instead of Table tools. After all, a Word table is just text and lines, right??

WRONG. So very, VERY wrong.

 

THE FIX

First, a note: The tables-that-aren’t-really-tables phenomenon is one reason that working with hidden formatting symbols showing is so important! With tabs, spaces, and paragraph marks showing, you can immediately spot the difference between this real table:

and this pretend table, which consists of drawn lines and text separated by multiple tabs:

To learn what to do next in this and other terrible table situations, check out “A Table Is a Table Is a Table” from Inera’s User Documentation library (particularly Methods 4 and 5).