MS Word strikes again
I've been working on and off for hours filling out various parts of Section 4 of Part 2 of Lesson III of the course notes for my Qaballah and Tarot course. Over a period of about two hours, I carefully, painstakingly filled in footnote after footnote having to do with the Great Old Ones of Lovecraft's Mythos universe, several single-spaced pages of it. And then, when I went to put in the last footnote, Word started dropping long underlines into it, over and over and over.
The long underlines are the lines sectioning off the beginnings and ends of footnote/sidebar sections; Word will do it automatically if you type in two or three dashes ("---") in succession, then hit the Enter key; when you do that, it converts those few dashes into one straight line going across the page. (If you type three long dashes by holding down the spacebar as you type, instead, you get a much thicker line that way.) Apparently Word looks at the formatting of the preceding text to decide how far to indent the damned thing, too -- the underlines it was dropping in all went to the right-hand margin, all right, but were indented in several different ways from the left-hand margin, in integral multiples of five space. The more I tried to delete the underlines, the more they proliferated, until I was about to go mad.
I finally copied all the footnotes in that section, cut-and-pasted them to a LiveJournal "Post an Entry" page (like the one I'm typing this entry on right now), leaving only blank lines between the long underlines, then highlighted those lines and everything in between and hit "Delete," which eliminated them. I then cut-and-pasted the text I'd transferred to the LJ blank page back onto the Word document in the area where they'd been before. After (swearing a lot) painstakingly putting back the forematting and so on that the transfer to the LJ blank eliminated, I then finally added the long underlines sectioning the whole thing off from the regular text. I was successful in that -- but it took me damned near three hours to enter all the data, then get rid of the long underlines I didn't want and put the data back onto the Word document and complete the thing.
If they ever haul somebody in King County up on charges of murdering a Microsoft programmer, I hope I don't get selected for the jury that tries him, because I would overwhelmingly vote to set him free even if he was clearly guilty as sin of all charges.
Mercury goes retrograde tomorrow. I wonder what other delights retrograde Mercury will have in store for me?
The long underlines are the lines sectioning off the beginnings and ends of footnote/sidebar sections; Word will do it automatically if you type in two or three dashes ("---") in succession, then hit the Enter key; when you do that, it converts those few dashes into one straight line going across the page. (If you type three long dashes by holding down the spacebar as you type, instead, you get a much thicker line that way.) Apparently Word looks at the formatting of the preceding text to decide how far to indent the damned thing, too -- the underlines it was dropping in all went to the right-hand margin, all right, but were indented in several different ways from the left-hand margin, in integral multiples of five space. The more I tried to delete the underlines, the more they proliferated, until I was about to go mad.
I finally copied all the footnotes in that section, cut-and-pasted them to a LiveJournal "Post an Entry" page (like the one I'm typing this entry on right now), leaving only blank lines between the long underlines, then highlighted those lines and everything in between and hit "Delete," which eliminated them. I then cut-and-pasted the text I'd transferred to the LJ blank page back onto the Word document in the area where they'd been before. After (swearing a lot) painstakingly putting back the forematting and so on that the transfer to the LJ blank eliminated, I then finally added the long underlines sectioning the whole thing off from the regular text. I was successful in that -- but it took me damned near three hours to enter all the data, then get rid of the long underlines I didn't want and put the data back onto the Word document and complete the thing.
If they ever haul somebody in King County up on charges of murdering a Microsoft programmer, I hope I don't get selected for the jury that tries him, because I would overwhelmingly vote to set him free even if he was clearly guilty as sin of all charges.
Mercury goes retrograde tomorrow. I wonder what other delights retrograde Mercury will have in store for me?