January 2018 Newsletter

eXtyles, Edifix, and industry updates from Inera, featuring new eXtyles Tooltips, MS Equation Editor, Word Tips, and more!

Spotlight on eXtyles Tooltips

The eXtyles user interface has grown and evolved over the years, and it can be tricky to remember exactly what each feature does—particularly those you don’t use very often. To help you make the most of the tools at your disposal, we’ve added Tooltips in eXtyles releases since September 2017 (look for them in your next eXtyles update if you haven’t received one recently!). These Tooltips appear for every item on the eXtyles tab, as well as providing some useful info in the Cleanup dialog, the Paragraph Styling palette, the Compare to Baseline dialog, and the Post-Processing Cleanup dialog. Hover your mouse over a menu or dialog item for helpful hints about the tool!

The eXtyles tab also looks a little different, to make room for some optional new features such as Enhanced Auto-Redact and offer better access to existing tools.

Learn more about Tooltips!

Breaking news: Microsoft Equation Editor

Microsoft’s security patches release in early January 2018 included complete removal of Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0. This subset of MathType licensed by Microsoft more than 20 years ago had a recently revealed security flaw, and rather than update the add-in, Microsoft decided to remove it from Word. We don’t expect that this decision will affect most eXtyles users, since most math-intensive eXtyles users have already licensed MathType. However, it may have a significant impact on authors, since many publishers prefer MathType-format equations over Word’s Equation Builder format and ask authors to use Equation Editor. (For more on different math formats in Word, see Bruce Rosenblum and Caitlin Gebhard’s JATS-Con 2016 paper “Wrangling Math from Microsoft Word into JATS XML Workflows.”) If you have instructed your authors to use Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0, we recommend that you revisit your Instructions to Authors and point to the Wiris website (http://www.wiris.com/equation_editor/microsoft), where they can obtain a 30-day demonstration version of MathType that can be used to edit Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0 equations.

New customer highlights

A warm Inera welcome to new eXtyles customer Sendaikyodo Printing Co.! A printing company founded in 1953 and headquartered in Sendai, Japan, Sendaikyodo has developed an online peer-review product called SciEd® (Scientific Journal Editing System). Next spring, they will release the updated SciEd® v. 2, which can be used to easily customize a peer-review process and choose language settings from two languages.

Thinking beyond the Latin alphabet

Inera CEO Bruce Rosenblum was invited to speak at the Face/Interface conference at Stanford University on December 1, 2017 (can you spot the two Bruces in the photo?). Here’s what he had to say about the experience:

Sometimes life presents us with opportunities to double back on our past in the context of our present. I was invited to speak at the Stanford University Face/Interface Conference in early December about my first professional project, Sinotype III. Sinotype III was a word processor for Chinese developed for the Apple II (with 80k of RAM and a 5MB hard drive!) in 1981. The project extended work my father had done for computer typesetting of Chinese and other non-Latin scripts from the 1950s to the 1980s.

See the slides

But Face/Interface was about much more than Chinese typesetting. It can best be described as “heaven” for anyone interested in non-Latin scripts on computers. A global array of researchers, type designers, computing professionals representing major Silicon Valley computing giants, and Unicode Consortium members attended the conference, which was funded by a diverse group including both the Stanford Humanities Center and the Department of Computer Science (the first time these two groups had funded the same meeting!), a testament to the interdisciplinary focus of the topic.

How did this “double back” for me? First, eXtyles is routinely used for non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Cyrillic, and Greek. Second, conference chair Tom Mullaney’s fascinating book The Chinese Typewriter was recently published by MIT Press using eXtyles. Finally, one of the last questions of the day, in relation to Greek writing from 700 BCE, was “How do you encode non-Unicode characters in XML?” This question, from an attendee who works at a major scholarly publisher in the humanities, led directly back to my work on JATS and BITS. I feel fortunate to have had this unique opportunity to pull together all the parts of my career in one meeting.

 

JATS-Con call for participation

JATS-Con, the peer-reviewed user conference for the Journal Article Tag Suite (NISO Z39.96-2015), is looking for papers for 2018! JATS-Con 2018 takes place on April 17 & 18 on the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, MD.

Have an idea for a presentation relevant to the use of JATS, BITS, or the new NISO STS standard? Proposals are due by February 2!

Get details and topic suggestions!

Find Inera at upcoming conferences

Typefi User Conference

Brighton, UK, 22 & 23 March

JATS-Con

Bethesda, MD, 17 & 18 April

Inera’s Bruce Rosenblum will be attending this year’s JATS-Con, the peer-reviewed, NLM-hosted conference on all things JATS—but also all things BITS and STS! (Also see the JATS-Con call for participation above.)

Council of Science Editors Annual Meeting

New Orleans, LA, 5–8 May

Inera’s Elizabeth Blake will be attending CSE 2018 and will once again be an instructor for the Short Course for Manuscript Editors!

Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting

Chicago, IL, 30 May–1 June

Inera’s Elizabeth Blake and Bruce Rosenblum will be attending this special 40th anniversary edition of the SSP Annual Meeting, and Bruce will be co-chairing a session with Christine Orr of Ringgold on Metadata and Persistent Identifiers through the Research and Publication Cycle.

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

Working with Word

Word Tip: Copy and paste with tracked changes

Most editors do a lot of work with Track Changes on, and sometimes it’s very useful to be able to copy text with tracked changes from one Word document to another. Your roving reporter worked for many years in versions of Word that didn’t allow this—but current versions do … as long as you know the correct steps to take! In the example below, we’ll use translation terminology: the document you’re pasting from is the source file, and the document you’re pasting to is the target file.

  1. In your source file, turn Track Changes off.
  2. Select the text you want to copy. (If you’re copying a whole paragraph or more, be sure you grab the final paragraph mark!)
  3. Copy or cut the text, using your preferred method (right-click on the selection and choose Copy or Cut; hit Ctrl+c to copy or Ctrl+x to cut; or use the Copy or Cut button on the Home tab).
  4. In your target file, turn Track Changes off.
  5. Place the insertion point where you want the text inserted.
  6. Paste the text, using your preferred method (right-click on the selection and choose a Paste option; hit Ctrl+v; or use the Paste
    button on the Home tab).

If you have more than one chunk of text to copy and paste, consider using the Spike method. We highlighted the Spike in our August 2017 newsletter—scroll down to Word Tips to read all about it!

Epic Word Fail: Hung up on hanging indents

We’re betting that you, too, have at some point seen a bibliography that looks something like this:

Let’s count the issues: we’ve got un-alphabetized entries, we’ve got paragraph breaks and tabs instead of hanging indents, we’ve got a blank paragraph after every entry … this “workaround” for hanging indents is distressingly common, because many style guides call for hanging indents on reference entries and many authors don’t know how to use Word’s Ruler or Paragraph dialog to create them (or even that these tools exist).

Of course, we want to make sure the list is alphabetical, and both eXtyles and Word have tools that can help us with that! But not yet. Word’s Sort function sorts individual paragraphs, so if we don’t get rid of all those extra paragraph breaks, we’ll end up with this extremely non-optimal outcome:

What to do? Well, in a non-eXtyles workflow, you’re in for some find-and-replace work: you’ll need to (1) search for paragraph breaks followed by tabs (^p^t in the Find box) and replace them with spaces; (2) replace ^p^p with ^p to weed out blank paragraphs; and (3) find and replace multiple spaces (remember, keep replacing until you get to 0!). Then you can use Word’s Sort button (found on the Home tab, Sort shows an A, a Z, and a down arrow) to alphabetize the entries.

With eXtyles, you have two options:

  1. First, let Cleanup’s Auto-Style References tool take a crack at the problem. If that doesn’t get rid of all the extra white space—or if it gets rid of too much!—then you’ll want to go back and try option 2.
  2. This is that unusual case that calls for using Paragraph Styling before Cleanup. It also calls for hotkeys! Activate your document and, with your cursor at the beginning of your bibliography, call up the Paragraph Styling Palette and navigate to the tab that holds the style you use for reference entries. Apply that style to the first line of the first reference entry, then use “with previous” (hotkey: w) to add subsequent “paragraphs” to it and “delete” (hotkey: d) to delete blank paragraphs. Don’t worry about double spaces and unnecessary tabs! Before you know it, you’ll have your bibliography styled and you can run Cleanup to get rid of those leftover tabs and spaces in a flash. (Don’t forget to turn off Auto-Style References if you would normally turn it on—with this method, your references are already styled, and Cleanup will run a bit faster without it.)

If you have eXtyles Reference Sorting, you can use that tool to sort the references alphabetically and chronologically. If not, it’s now safe to alphabetize the list using Word’s Sort button!

Happy New Year, everyone!