Re: Font colour changes in global substitutions

[brian]

On Mon, 1 Aug 2016 16:03:56 +, you wrote:

>On 01/08/2016 00:54, brian wrote:
>
>> is published via Amazon's 'print on demand' services. We send Amazon
>> the book as a PDF, they print a copy when somebody buys one. 
>
>Have you looked at the price difference between B and 4 colour
>printing? For this specific usage --- hearts and diamonds in red ---  is
>it worth the roughly six cents per page price difference?
>

That decision wasn't mine to make. The first two books in the series
had a LOT of hand diagrams and the person who was overseeing the
entire project decided that the cost of colour was justified. As
merely the author of most of one volume, I had no grounds on which to
dispute that decision. 

>For ebook formats (PDF, epub, mobi, fb2, etc) the major issue with
>colour is that most e-ink screens don't display them properly. For
>non-e-ink devices, colour is rendered correctly. As such, colouring
>hearts and diamonds in red is a non-issue.
>

Left to my own devices, I would have distributed them in purely
electronic format, but see above. The decision to go with physical
books wasn't mine to make. 


>> No conventional publisher would touch it with a barge pole.
>
>The organization that hired you to write the material is the publisher.

Hired me? :) I wish...  This is a volunteer project. What I meant by
the sentence you quoted is that the circulation of these books will
never be anything like large enough to publish via the conventional
route. 

>As such, what is needed is a printer, not a publisher.
>
>Personally, for POD I'd rather go with Ingram Spark for non-Amazon
>sales, holding off on CreateSpace until Amazon's non-stocking policy
>makes using it imperative. On the flipside, IngramSpark mandates that
>one knows exactly what one is doing, whilst CreateSpace mandates that
>one be utterly clueless.
>

Yet again, not my decision. All I've undertaken to do is to document
that part of the system where I'm the one who knows it best and send
it as an Open Office file to the person running the entire project. I
have had no part whatsoever in producing the first two volumes, and am
putting in about 75% of the effort required to write the third (much
smaller) volume. I've no grounds on which to dispute decision which
have already been taken, I implicitly accepted them when I agreed to
do the work. 

But thank you for your suggestions about the colour changes, I'm not
sure I fully understand them as yet, but I will have a bit of a play
with a test file and see what I can work out. 


Brian. 

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Re: Font colour changes in global substitutions

[Brian Barker]

At 20:54 31/07/2016 -0400, Brian Meadows wrote:

On Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:45:46 +0100, Brian Barker wrote:
Are you sure that your book publisher will want to print hearts and 
diamonds symbols in red in otherwise black text in your book?


Absolutely certain. It's the third volume of three in a series which 
is published via Amazon's 'print on demand' services. We send Amazon 
the book as a PDF, they print a copy when somebody buys one.


I can't trace your earlier works; in any case, I imagine they don't 
have red symbols or you would not be asking this question now.


Other have commented on the advisability or otherwise of printing red 
symbols in an otherwise monochrome book. I've looked at a few other 
bridge books on Amazon, and none of them use red symbols. One uses 
grey symbols for hearts and diamonds, an interesting way to 
distinguish them from the black suits without using another printing 
colour. Surely readers will know that half the suits are red, won't 
they? I imagine that anyone who has difficulty remembering that 
hearts and diamonds are red without continual reminders in the text 
is unlikely to become a proficient bridge player!


But it's your book and your choice, of course.

The reason not to leave them until the end is because some of the 
alignment is quite tricky, and I don't want to screw it up by 
changing the length of some of the strings when doing the final substitution.


There are good ways and bad ways to align text. Choosing a good way 
should minimise such problems.


Brian Barker 



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Re: Font colour changes in global substitutions

[toki]

On 01/08/2016 00:54, brian wrote:

> is published via Amazon's 'print on demand' services. We send Amazon
> the book as a PDF, they print a copy when somebody buys one. 

Have you looked at the price difference between B and 4 colour
printing? For this specific usage --- hearts and diamonds in red ---  is
it worth the roughly six cents per page price difference?

For ebook formats (PDF, epub, mobi, fb2, etc) the major issue with
colour is that most e-ink screens don't display them properly. For
non-e-ink devices, colour is rendered correctly. As such, colouring
hearts and diamonds in red is a non-issue.

> No conventional publisher would touch it with a barge pole.

The organization that hired you to write the material is the publisher.
As such, what is needed is a printer, not a publisher.

Personally, for POD I'd rather go with Ingram Spark for non-Amazon
sales, holding off on CreateSpace until Amazon's non-stocking policy
makes using it imperative. On the flipside, IngramSpark mandates that
one knows exactly what one is doing, whilst CreateSpace mandates that
one be utterly clueless.

jonathon




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Re: Font colour changes in global substitutions

[toki]

On 31/07/2016 22:45, brian wrote:

> substitute the red suit symbols for hearts and diamonds (I cheat by
> copying the symbols from elsewhere in the text) but I can't work out
> how to then switch back to black text after I've done the substitution, 

Character Styles.
Create one for Red Suites and one for Black Suites.

Write your document using your usual character style.  When finished,
write a macro that searches for each heart, and applies the Red Suite
character style to it, then change that macro so search for each
diamond, to apply the Red Suite character style to it.  Then modify it
to search for each spade, and apply the Black Suite character style to
it, then change it to search for each club, applying the Black Suite
character style.

> Secondary question: Is there any such thing as a 'reveal codes' option

If you modify the formatting toolbar appropriately, the formatting
changes are displayed there, as one moves through the document. That is
about as close to usable Reveal Codes functionality as you'll find for AOo.

jonathon




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Re: Font colour changes in global substitutions

[brian]

On Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:45:46 +0100, Brian Barker wrote:

I think you hit my answer lower down your reply, so excuse the snip...


>A few thoughts:
>
>o Are you sure that your book publisher will want to print hearts and 
>diamonds symbols in red in otherwise black text in your book?
>

Absolutely certain. It's the third volume of three in a series which
is published via Amazon's 'print on demand' services. We send Amazon
the book as a PDF, they print a copy when somebody buys one. 

>o Are you sure, if your publisher will print these in red, that their 
>system will properly inherit the colours from your word processor 
>document? 

From the PDF, yes. All they're doing is printing a copy off on a
colour printer, binding it, and sending it to the buyer. 

>It is probably more likely that the book designer will 
>mandate that these symbols should be red (if that is the case) and 
>the compositor will follow that instruction. In that case, you do not 
>need your symbols to be coloured. At best, all you need is a note to 
>the publisher about your preference.
>

We're the designers as well as the authors. :) 

This is only ever going to be an *extremely* small circulation set of
books.  We're documenting a bidding system as a service to a group of
players (and possible future players) who learn the system via classes
taught on an online bridge service. No conventional publisher would
touch it with a barge pole. If any of the books ever sells more than
100 copies, I will be surprised. As you will have guessed, we don't
exactly expect to retire on the proceeds. :) 

>o You can probably make your life much easier by leaving the 
>substitution until you have finished the book text. Then you won't 
>need ever to insert text after your red symbols. 

Now THAT is the very obvious fix that I was missing...  

>Did your original 
>have "hearts" and "diamonds"? Why not leave these and replace them 
>once you have (more or less) finalised the text? Better still, why 
>not type codes - perhaps something like #h and #d? - and replace 
>these at the end? That way, there is less risk of your replacing the 
>small number of occurrences of the words that you probably need to 
>retain spelled out.
>
The reason not to leave them until the end is because some of the
alignment is quite tricky, and I don't want to screw it up by changing
the length of some of the strings when doing the final substitution.
However, if I change them to codes of the same length now, then that
should solve that particular problem. 

>I trust this helps.
>

It did. Thank you. 

I'm not overly familiar with the intricacies of word processors, I'm
much more at home with programmers' editors and IDEs. My knowledge of
Word Perfect came from those occasions when I wasn't able to get out
of producing user documentation for the programs I'd written. Word
Perfect was our standard (I'm going back a few years!) The reason I'm
trying to use Open Office now is because my co-author and I differ on
our choice of operating system, and we needed something which crossed
platforms.

Brian. 

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Re: Font colour changes in global substitutions

[Tina]

You have to make sure that the font has all changed to black again. Sorry if 
I'm not explaining this correctly. You have to make sure that the colour in the 
little box is black again and not red. After pasting the character, select it, 
go to colour selection, choose black and it will change. Then after pressing 
the spacing bar, the colour in the box might change back to red again. If this 
happens, then once again go to the colour selection for fonts and choose either 
black or the default colour. Sometimes, when typing, we forget that the space 
that follows the character in question will automatically have the same 
characteristics as the letter, number, or whatever of the previous one. I too 
have sometimes encountered this problem. Just have a bit of patience.
 
Tina

"'God' brings us into each others lives for a reason and purpose that we may 
never know until the end. But every interaction that we have - even if just a 
simple smile, is a catalyst for something bigger, with a positive or negative 
outcome, so you must be aware of yourself so you can help another when it is 
needed." ~SchaOn



| I'm trying to do my bit to help the environment and thought you  |
| may be interested in taking part? To join the movement on  |
| WAYN.com and help make a difference. |

 

El Domingo, 31 de julio, 2016 18:46:03, Brian Barker 
 escribió:
 

 At 18:45 31/07/2016 -0400, Brian Meadows wrote:
>I have a draft of a bridge (the card game) book to work on. My 
>co-author and I have decided to use the suit symbols where possible, 
>and I need to make that change retrospectively. I know how to 
>substitute the red suit symbols for hearts and diamonds (I cheat by 
>copying the symbols from elsewhere in the text) but I can't work out
>how to then switch back to black text after I've done the 
>substitution, if I change the text after the substituted symbol then 
>it comes out in red, which is NOT what I want.

It's standard behaviour in all word processors, I think, that any new 
text typed in inherits its formatting from the immediately preceding text.

>I tried adding a unique string in black after the symbol and then 
>substituting that out, nope, doesn't work, I still have the problem 
>that I seem to have switched to red text.

No, you simply have one red character and Writer assumes that you 
would want anything following it also to be red. Imagine if this were 
not the case: if you added a single character in some text, perhaps 
to correct a spelling error, it would appear in some default format, 
and you would have to go back and change it to a different font, font 
size, bold, italic, whatever - like your existing formatted 
surrounding text! No: this arrangement is generally helpful.

>This would take me about two minutes in dear old Word Perfect, ...

That's because Word Perfect is both "dear" and "old" - in other 
words, that you are familiar with it. It takes much less than two 
minutes do something similar in OpenOffice - once you become familiar 
with that too.

>I've spent more than two hours trying to solve the problem in OO. 
>Can someone please save my remaining sanity and tell me how to do 
>this, I have a LOT of symbols to substitute, far too many to do them by hand.

You are seeing the problem as something different from what it is. 
Replacing your original text with red symbols is the right thing to 
do. You just need to find a way to add following text back in the 
default colour afterwards. And you won't have "a lot" of occasions 
where you need to do this - at least, not at once. Read on.

>Secondary question: Is there any such thing as a 'reveal codes' 
>option in Open Office where you can see all these things like font 
>changes etc. embedded in your document?

Yes and no. If you want to unpack the document file, the XML 
description of your document is indeed a markup language, and you 
could see something similar. But you would be very ill-advised to try 
to tinker with them there. Messing with the "codes" in Word Perfect 
was introduced to circumvent inefficiencies in the software, wasn't 
it? The trouble is that users became happy with interfering under the 
bonnet ("hood" if you are in that part of the world) and now don't 
appreciate being able to do things properly through the normal 
interface. So the short answer is "No": don't think of the problem that way.

Here are a few techniques:

o Is there generally a space after the symbol? Hopefully you won't 
have made that space red as well. If you type your additional 
material after that space, it will not become red.

o In any case, instead of typing immediately after your coloured 
symbol, start one character to the right (or one word if you prefer), 
retype that spare character at the end of your new text, and return 
to delete the original single character afterwards.

o Just type away in red, select your new text, and use the Font 
Colour drop-down in the Formatting toolbar to return the colour 

Re: Font colour changes in global substitutions

[Brian Barker]

At 18:45 31/07/2016 -0400, Brian Meadows wrote:
I have a draft of a bridge (the card game) book to work on. My 
co-author and I have decided to use the suit symbols where possible, 
and I need to make that change retrospectively. I know how to 
substitute the red suit symbols for hearts and diamonds (I cheat by 
copying the symbols from elsewhere in the text) but I can't work out
how to then switch back to black text after I've done the 
substitution, if I change the text after the substituted symbol then 
it comes out in red, which is NOT what I want.


It's standard behaviour in all word processors, I think, that any new 
text typed in inherits its formatting from the immediately preceding text.


I tried adding a unique string in black after the symbol and then 
substituting that out, nope, doesn't work, I still have the problem 
that I seem to have switched to red text.


No, you simply have one red character and Writer assumes that you 
would want anything following it also to be red. Imagine if this were 
not the case: if you added a single character in some text, perhaps 
to correct a spelling error, it would appear in some default format, 
and you would have to go back and change it to a different font, font 
size, bold, italic, whatever - like your existing formatted 
surrounding text! No: this arrangement is generally helpful.



This would take me about two minutes in dear old Word Perfect, ...


That's because Word Perfect is both "dear" and "old" - in other 
words, that you are familiar with it. It takes much less than two 
minutes do something similar in OpenOffice - once you become familiar 
with that too.


I've spent more than two hours trying to solve the problem in OO. 
Can someone please save my remaining sanity and tell me how to do 
this, I have a LOT of symbols to substitute, far too many to do them by hand.


You are seeing the problem as something different from what it is. 
Replacing your original text with red symbols is the right thing to 
do. You just need to find a way to add following text back in the 
default colour afterwards. And you won't have "a lot" of occasions 
where you need to do this - at least, not at once. Read on.


Secondary question: Is there any such thing as a 'reveal codes' 
option in Open Office where you can see all these things like font 
changes etc. embedded in your document?


Yes and no. If you want to unpack the document file, the XML 
description of your document is indeed a markup language, and you 
could see something similar. But you would be very ill-advised to try 
to tinker with them there. Messing with the "codes" in Word Perfect 
was introduced to circumvent inefficiencies in the software, wasn't 
it? The trouble is that users became happy with interfering under the 
bonnet ("hood" if you are in that part of the world) and now don't 
appreciate being able to do things properly through the normal 
interface. So the short answer is "No": don't think of the problem that way.


Here are a few techniques:

o Is there generally a space after the symbol? Hopefully you won't 
have made that space red as well. If you type your additional 
material after that space, it will not become red.


o In any case, instead of typing immediately after your coloured 
symbol, start one character to the right (or one word if you prefer), 
retype that spare character at the end of your new text, and return 
to delete the original single character afterwards.


o Just type away in red, select your new text, and use the Font 
Colour drop-down in the Formatting toolbar to return the colour to 
Automatic (or whatever).


A few thoughts:

o Are you sure that your book publisher will want to print hearts and 
diamonds symbols in red in otherwise black text in your book?


o Are you sure, if your publisher will print these in red, that their 
system will properly inherit the colours from your word processor 
document? It is probably more likely that the book designer will 
mandate that these symbols should be red (if that is the case) and 
the compositor will follow that instruction. In that case, you do not 
need your symbols to be coloured. At best, all you need is a note to 
the publisher about your preference.


o You can probably make your life much easier by leaving the 
substitution until you have finished the book text. Then you won't 
need ever to insert text after your red symbols. Did your original 
have "hearts" and "diamonds"? Why not leave these and replace them 
once you have (more or less) finalised the text? Better still, why 
not type codes - perhaps something like #h and #d? - and replace 
these at the end? That way, there is less risk of your replacing the 
small number of occurrences of the words that you probably need to 
retain spelled out.


I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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Re: Font colour changes in global substitutions

[Tina]

Hi,
Just as if you were using normal Word. Select that which you want to change. 
Then go to font colour and select the colour black. It will automatically 
change to black. Easy as pie. Hope this helps somewhat.
Cheers,
 
Tina

"'God' brings us into each others lives for a reason and purpose that we may 
never know until the end. But every interaction that we have - even if just a 
simple smile, is a catalyst for something bigger, with a positive or negative 
outcome, so you must be aware of yourself so you can help another when it is 
needed." ~SchaOn



| I'm trying to do my bit to help the environment and thought you  |
| may be interested in taking part? To join the movement on  |
| WAYN.com and help make a difference. |

 

El Domingo, 31 de julio, 2016 17:45:55, brian  
escribió:
 

 
Hi folks, 

This may be a simple question, excuse me if so, but I'm none too
familiar with Open Office, I'm only using it for compatibility
purposes. I HAVE looked at the help information, and if it tells me
how to do this, then I'm missing it. 

I have a draft of a bridge (the card game) book to work on. My
co-author and I have decided to use the suit symbols where possible,
and I need to make that change retrospectively. I know how to
substitute the red suit symbols for hearts and diamonds (I cheat by
copying the symbols from elsewhere in the text) but I can't work out
how to then switch back to black text after I've done the
substitution, if I change the text after the substituted symbol then
it comes out in red, which is NOT what I want. I tried adding a unique
string in black after the symbol and then substituting that out, nope,
doesn't work, I still have the problem that I seem to have switched to
red text. 

This would take me about two minutes in dear old Word Perfect, I've
spent more than two hours trying to solve the problem in OO. Can
someone please save my remaining sanity and tell me how to do this, I
have a LOT of symbols to substitute, far too many to do them by hand. 

Secondary question: Is there any such thing as a 'reveal codes' option
in Open Office where you can see all these things like font changes
etc. embedded in your document? 

Thanks, 

Brian. 

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Font colour changes in global substitutions

[brian]

Hi folks, 

This may be a simple question, excuse me if so, but I'm none too
familiar with Open Office, I'm only using it for compatibility
purposes. I HAVE looked at the help information, and if it tells me
how to do this, then I'm missing it. 

I have a draft of a bridge (the card game) book to work on. My
co-author and I have decided to use the suit symbols where possible,
and I need to make that change retrospectively. I know how to
substitute the red suit symbols for hearts and diamonds (I cheat by
copying the symbols from elsewhere in the text) but I can't work out
how to then switch back to black text after I've done the
substitution, if I change the text after the substituted symbol then
it comes out in red, which is NOT what I want. I tried adding a unique
string in black after the symbol and then substituting that out, nope,
doesn't work, I still have the problem that I seem to have switched to
red text. 

This would take me about two minutes in dear old Word Perfect, I've
spent more than two hours trying to solve the problem in OO. Can
someone please save my remaining sanity and tell me how to do this, I
have a LOT of symbols to substitute, far too many to do them by hand. 

Secondary question: Is there any such thing as a 'reveal codes' option
in Open Office where you can see all these things like font changes
etc. embedded in your document? 

Thanks, 

Brian. 

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