Understanding Word's nonprinting characters or formatting marks. Word’s nonprinting formatting marks. Occasionally a new user of Word is alarmed to discover that his previously pristine document is full of strange symbols—dots, arrows, paragraphs marks, and the like.
I don't expect to get too much sympathy here, but I just picked up a version of Office for my Mac, and I need some help. I used to use OpenOffice, and I'm in the process of converting those files to Word files.but my problem is this: I've taken a few Latin classes.so a lot of my documents have characters with accents on them. And I can't seem to find the right accents in Word.
Word DOES have an 'insert symbol' option with SOME accented letters, but the accent i need isn't one of the slanted bars, it's just a long-mark. Like a hyphen over the letter.
It certainly SHOULD be in word SOMEWHERE but I don't know how i'd go about hunting it down. If anyone can help me out, I'd appreciate it. Thanks for the help, everyone.sigh. i spoke too soon. Character Palette does, in fact, have the characters I need, but when i select them, the 'Insert' option goes gray and inactive. I can't copy and paste them, I can't insert them, and I can't seem to get the character into my document at all. For what it's worth, 'macron' would have been a much better description of the accent I need than the one I offered before.
Doesn't it seem suspicious that Word wouldn't offer that? I mean it seems like something that's fundemental enough, at least, that it shouldn't be omitted completely.
Originally posted by absurdio.sigh. i spoke too soon. Character Palette does, in fact, have the characters I need, but when i select them, the 'Insert' option goes gray and inactive. I can't copy and paste them, I can't insert them, and I can't seem to get the character into my document at all. For what it's worth, 'macron' would have been a much better description of the accent I need than the one I offered before.
Doesn't it seem suspicious that Word wouldn't offer that? I mean it seems like something that's fundemental enough, at least, that it shouldn't be omitted completely. As PowerBookG5 said, check out the System Preferences - International - Input Menu and enable 'Keyboard Viewer.' You'll get a new menu with an American flag. Then select 'Show Keyboard Viewer' and you'll have what once was KeyCaps, an app like Windows' Character Map.
From there, you can hold down option and see special characters. The ones with the white borders are symbols that you can choose and then the next letter you type will have that symbol. This is assuming you have Panther. Otherwise, just look for the application KeyCaps, should be in the Utilities folder under versions up to Jaguar.
For the homework due today what I did was this: did most of the work in Word and then added the necessary accents in OpenOffice. I actually really like Open Office (at least usually). The one major thing I have against it is that, since it runs off of XDarwin, it doesn't interact with the rest of the OS. That rules out actions like cutting and pasting from one application to another.and.that's something I do quite a bit. For the moment, I suppose I can keep using both apps, one to compose and another to add accents, but I'll be REALLY disappointed if those accents just aren't an option in Word.
The thing is, the macrons are not a part of the original Latin language, but in fact, added by translators to assist in learning and speaking the language. My teacher never cared for them so we rarely used them, but then again, I always wrote out my Latin homework on paper. It's odd that a massive program like Word won't do macrons, though, especially when a program as basic as TextEdit uses them perfectly. Perhaps you can just use that instead to type out your homework since it supports unicode, it's integrated with the OS, and it's built into OS X to begin with (meaning it's free). You're very right.
The occurrances of these macrons aren't all that great; we use them only in very rare, distinct cases, just like you said. However, it'd be nice to be able to include them when I need to. Last semester I did all my homework out by hand, but, as I'm quicker at typing than I am at writing, I figured I may as well give this a shot. Does anyone know of any third-party download, perhaps, that'd allow Word to support unicode? I mean I don't know anything about it, and that's probably a stretch.but if nothing else, I'll just start using text edit. I just have to wonder what the hell the Word programmers were thinking (that's hardly a first, come to think of it.).
Unicode and Word Word X does not support Unicode, and there's no plugin available that adds this functionality. You will have to wait till Office 2004 comes out in June.
However, you should really switch from OpenOffice X11 to NeoOffice/J with the latest patch applied. NeoOffice/J is another version of OpenOffice that uses Java instead of X11. It looks and behaves the same, but it has two big advantages compared to OpenOffice. You can copy and paste to other applications and you can use all fonts available in Mac OS X. You can download NeoOffice/J and then you should follow. Click to expand.NeoOffice 0.8 is by now very stable.
I use it every day. You don't need a patch anymore, just download it. It works with Mac OS X 10.2, too. NeoOffice is just like OpenOffice 1.0.3 (same features, same menus, etc.).
You can install NeoOffice and OpenOffice at the same time, there are no conflicts. Unfortunately, NeoOffice is a bit slower than OpenOffice/X11, but it's certainly usable. EDIT: By the way, the author of NeoOffice/J states that NeoOffice is not yet complete enough to be used for real work. That's no longer true. The author just hasn't updated his page yet.