November 2017 Newsletter

eXtyles, Edifix, and industry updates from Inera!

Introducing … eXtyles STS!

Last month NISO announced that NISO STS (Standards Tag Suite), the standard for XML markup of standards, is now officially ANSI/NISO Z39.102-2017. To help standards organizations adopt NISO STS, we’ve introduced a new member of the Inera family: eXtyles STS! This newest eXtyles configuration is designed for standards publishers to get a fast and cost-efficient start with an XML workflow. For all the details, check out our latest eXtyles blog post!

 

What’s new with JATS?

Introducing JATS 1.2d1! On October 10, the JATS working group released supporting materials for JATS version 1.2d1, including schemas and documentation for the Archiving (green), Publishing (blue), and Authoring (orange) Tag Libraries. What’s changed in this draft version of JATS? Find out here.

What’s this I hear about JATS4R? If you don’t know about JATS for Reuse (JATS4R)—or if you know a little and need to know more—we highly recommend this engaging and informative post by Mary Seligy of Canadian Science Publishing and JATS4R!

Now playing: Standardizing Standards

In the realm of standards, eXtyles STS isn’t the only thing we’ve been up to:

On October 9, Inera co-hosted the Geneva edition of NISO’s “XML for Standards Publishers”; you can see the presenters’ slides here.

Inera is partnering with Typefi and standards experts to present “Standardizing Standards,” a series of 30-minute recorded webinars covering all aspects of why you should look into adopting STS and how Inera and Typefi can help you make the best use of STS to transform your publishing processes. Get all the info here!

 

News for MathType users

Wiris, the new owners of Design Science and MathType, recently reached out to Inera to learn more about eXtyles and how publishers use MathType. They sent their new CTO, Dani Marques, to XUG to hear from our user community about their needs for MathType and working with mathematical notation—including more export formats, better MathML rendering, and enhancements to equation conversion within Word. We’re excited that Wiris is taking such an active interest in MathType, and hope to report further news in the coming months.

If you missed XUG, you’re invited to reach out to Dani to start a discussion about your issues, requests, ideas, or anything else. Send email to [email protected].

 

It’s a wrap! All about XUG 2017

Thanks to everyone who helped make XUG 2017 a success, including those who joined us in Cambridge, MA, and those who followed #XUG2017 on Twitter. And a special thank-you to our guest presenters for sharing their insights with the rest of us!

Wondering what’s up with this year’s eXtyles enhancements and new features? We’ve got all the info for you on the eXtyles blog.

We’ve got a run-down of the meeting on the blog, and all the Thursday presentation slides are now available on our website (click on the presentation titles for access)!

One topic we discussed at some length: citing data sets! So here’s a timely and informative post on that topic from the NLM Technical Bulletin.

Finally, we’ve dramatically improved our eXtyles user documentation, and we think you’ll agree that finding the answers to your eXtyles questions has never been quicker or easier! Check out the brand-new eXtyles User Common Room and let us know what you think.

 

What happens in Frankfurt …

… goes everywhere! Thanks to everyone who visited the Inera booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair and/or attended CEO Bruce Rosenblum’s Hotspot talk for making this our best FBF ever!

Matt Turner, MarkLogic CTO Media and Entertainment, focused his Day 3 FBF blog on Publishing & Innovation—two words we love to hear together! Inera’s XML workflow solutions are highlighted in this informative Day 3 round-up, featuring Bruce’s Hotspot talk on ways of getting to XML.

 

Find Inera at upcoming conferences

Standards Technology Forum

New York, November 14–15

Inera’s Bruce Rosenblum will attend this meeting focused on improving standards organizations’ understanding of relevant new terms, tools, and technologies.

FACE/INTERFACE: Type Design and Human–Computer Interaction Beyond the Western World

Stanford University, Stanford, CA, December 1–2

Long before he joined Inera, CEO Bruce Rosenblum was already experimenting with publishing technologies, and he participated in early development of Chinese word processing in the 1980s. At this international conference of scholars, designers, engineers, and technologists, Bruce goes back to his roots to explore “Early Attempts to Photocompose Non-Latin Scripts.” FACE/INTERFACE takes place alongside the Fall 2017 Stanford University Libraries exhibition.

 

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: Auto-numbering Comments in Word 2013+

Remember how Word used to helpfully number your Comment balloons for you? Wasn’t that nice?

We were fond of numbered comments, and so is editor Adrienne Montgomerie, who has developed a helpful set of instructions for restoring something like this functionality. (Spoiler: it involves modifying paragraph styles! If you’re not sure how to do that, see here.)

A few additional notes from your friendly Word users at Inera:

  • You don’t need to open a Comment first in order to access the Comment Text style, but you do need to have that style showing somewhere, which may require
    going into Styles>Options and changing from “Recommended” to “All Styles” and “Alphabetical,” respectively, in the 2 dropdown lists.
  • All of Word’s auto-numbering options use tabs, which don’t show up in Comments. If you want any white space between the number (or number+punctuation)
    and the text of your comment, then rather than using one of the predefined options, define a new numbering format that uses one or two spaces after
    the number.

 

Epic Word Fail: All dashes are basically the same, right?

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: A new species of minus sign

Back when your roving reporter started out in the publishing world, she wasn’t even sure what an en dash was, so it’s hard to blame authors for not knowing the difference between an en dash and a minus sign. Today’s Exhibit A, to their credit, did in fact know there was a difference—but apparently wasn’t sure how to make a minus sign happen in Word, and therefore got very creative: they applied superscript formatting to an underscore character for every one of the dozens of negative numbers in their file.

The Fix

What should this beleaguered author have done instead? Word will let you insert a minus sign (−) via Insert Symbol, or you can type 2212, select it, and hit Alt-X to toggle from the Unicode entity to its associated glyph.

eXtyles user? You can insert a minus sign via Insert>Math on the eXtyles ribbon!

Should you by any chance encounter this error, you know what to do: search for _ with Superscript applied, and replace with a minus sign! Don’t forget to un-check Superscript for the Replace box, though, or you’ll end up with superscript minus signs. (To apply or remove formatting in the Find or Replace boxes, use the Format drop-down at the bottom left corner of the Find & Replace dialog.)