AlexPGP's Corner

As it turns out, I have a client who really, really does not like to see justified text in the documents I send him. This used to eat a certain amount of time during the post-translation phase, as the folks who put together the source document mix justified willy-nilly with left-aligned, with centered, as well as a dash of right-alignment to round things off.

So it was only natural for me to want to write a Word macro that, basically, goes through each paragraph within a document and changes only those with justified text to display as left-aligned. Check it out:

Sub ChangeJustifiedToLeft()

Dim oSource As Document
Set oSource = ActiveDocument

j = oSource.Paragraphs.Count

For i = 1 To j
StatusBar = "Processing " & i & " of " & j
If oSource.Paragraphs(i).Format.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphJustify Then
oSource.Paragraphs(i).Format.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphLeft
End If
Next i

End Sub

The StatusBar line is there to provide some visual feedback as the macro works its way through a file. Execution is not objectionably slow, but it's far from blazing fast. (Assigning the paragraph count to the variable j is done to keep things from slowing down even further by having to call oSource.Paragraphs.Count for each value of i.)

Cheers...

I was simply too tired last night to explain why the "- 1" was important in the macro line

myRange.End = myRangeEnd - 1

but not decrementing the value ate a lot of time, so hopefully, this post will reinforce the knowledge gained. (Can you tell I don't want to settle down and translate?)

By the time we get to this point in the code, we've selected the contents of the table cell we're working with and assigned them to a range called myRange. We've also saved the value of the end point in a variable called myRangeEnd.

If the pattern we're looking for is found, the next step after copying the pattern is to shorten the range to exclude the found pattern. To do this, I wrote code to move the start of the range over by the length of the pattern and then set the end of the range to the original end value.

Schematically, the initial range looks like:

it's time for {123}all{124} good men and women to party
S------------------------------------------------------E

After the first pattern is found, the range is:

it's time for {123}all{124} good men and women to party
              S----E

Then we move the start point "over" the end point:

it's time for {123}all{124} good men and women to party
                   S

And we restore the original end point:

it's time for {123}all{124} good men and women to party
                   S-----------------------------------E

Only after instrumenting the code to show my selection did I realize what that did. If you work much with Word tables, have you ever noticed what happens if you select text in a cell and go one character past the end? The contents of the entire cell become selected!

That's what was killing me yesterday: everytime the code was executed, the range being examined was being reset to the original range, and I couldn't figure out why.

Extending the end point to one character shy of "the end," i.e., like this:

it's time for {123}all{124} good men and women to party
                   S----------------------------------E

solved the problem. The next time the pattern is searched for, "{124}" will be found (even if it's at the end of the text).

Apropos of which, the macro works like a charm and actually makes it much easier to deal with the source text. It was a good investment in time.

Cheers...

UPDATE: Wordfast has this concept of a "placeable," which basically is any source text string that's not translatable, such as document designations (e.g., the '50578' in "SSP 50578"). It turns out - I find out by accident - that strings such as "{123}" are treated as placeables as well, and since Wordfast has hotkeys for navigating and copying placeables, it turns out my macro sort of reinvented the wheel. Still, I don't regret the time spent developing the code.