General Discussion and News > Technology Troubles
Writing Software
Lance Charnes:
Page up/page down works from where the cursor is, not from where you are on the screen. Make a change, leave the cursor in place, scroll down using the scroll bar, and hit page up/down, and it's going to use the cursor location as its starting point. This looks like Word has jumped backwards, but it actually did just what you asked it to do.
Any full-featured word processor is going to be similarly complex. Wordpad (included in Windows) is a minimalistic text editor, but you'll very rapidly get frustrated with how limited it is. WordPerfect is no better/worse than Word, just different, which means your Word learning curve suddenly becomes useless. Better to stay with the devil you know.
MTH:
I was a computer typesetter for ten years and we had fantastic software so I am completely spoiled I suppose. One thing Word seems to do is if it hypenates a word for you and you change the text or the margins, the word appears in the middle of a sentence with the hypen still in there. Is there a way around it? We had something called a "discretionary hypen" in typesetting days.
Lance Charnes:
You can have Word automatically hyphenate by turning on, yes, automatic hyphenation (Tools -> Language->Hyphenation). It works better with fully-justified text (which isn't necessary in manuscript format); with standard left-justified text, it will simply wrap words to the next line, unless they come with built-in hyphens.
If you're doing hyphenation, you can further control the process by using nonbreaking and optional hyphens. A nonbreaking hyphen is one that prevents a hyphenated word from breaking at the hyphen at the end of a line; the example in the Word help file is a phone number. An optional hyphen dictates where a word will break if it falls at the end of a line; for instance, you may want a word to break at its prefix or suffix instead of between other syllables.
You enter nonbreaking hyphens with CTRL-SHIFT-HYPHEN, and optional hyphens with CTRL-HYPHEN. Optional hyphens are invisible unless you tell Word to display them by checking the "optional hyphens" box in Tools->Options.
For the full skinny, go to "Microsoft Word Help" and enter "hyphenation" in the search box.
MTH:
Ah so! Thanks for that tip.
AleeshaW:
--- Quote ---Linda, does your laptop have a trackpad for a pointing device (instead of a mouse)? You're probably letting your thumb brush the pad. Happens to me a lot. I hate that part.
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I had this problem too! So, I (being a low tech sort of gal) cut out a piece of thin cardboard from the front of a note book and taped it along one edge, like a trap door. I made sure there was a little flap on it so that I can grab it easily. The trap door stays down while I'm typing and I flip it up when I need the mouse. Works great for me! ;D
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