Getting my bearings...

I made some progress yesterday with the 40K Job, which consisted in editing about 6,000 words of the file, which will reduce my despeckling effort at the end. There are now about 50,000 words left in the rest of my work file, which is a happy mish-mash of untouched source text (about 31,000 words), numbers (about 1500 words), and translated text (the rest).

I feel a lot better about knowing where I am and being able to reliably figure out just how hard I need to work (how much I need to accomplish) on a more or less daily basis to get this job finished on time. That information also guides me in figuring out just how much "outside" work I can safely take.

Among other nice things to have happened is learning how to deal with inline graphics in Word files in cases where the graphic is taller than the line it is "inline" with (which results in the graphic "sticking up" above the line). Click on the graphic, type Ctrl-D (which brings up the Font dialog box, select "Lowered" in the Position field under Character Spacing, and then enter an eyeballed figure in the By field to the right of the Position field.

The way I've described it is more complicated than the actual sequence of steps, but if there are a lot of such graphics in the text, it's probably best to go through the steps for the first graphic, and then to sequentially click on each subsequent graphic and type Ctrl-Y, which saves a bunch of steps.

I slept in, so I missed the ham breakfast. Still, it's a beautiful morning!

Cheers...

Amazing how some things just stick...

I probably owe my "apprenticeship" at Plenum more than I know.

It was there that I was introduced to the concept of "style," not in the commonly understood sense, but in the publishing sense, where it describes how to deal with the myriad little details that grammar does not care about.

Among the little "in house" rules that I learned during my first week on the job was:

1) "data" are plural (a position with which I do not currently agree);

2) a mention of a table is capitalized if it refers to a specific table (e.g., "The data are shown in Table 3.");

3) all references to specific figures take the form "Fig." (or "Figs." if more than one figure is intended); this word was only spelled out if it occurred at the start of a sentence.

4) mathematical expressions were not to be referred to (as the Russian original so often did) as "formulas"; all mathematical "formulas" were to be recast as "relations," "equations," "inequalities," "expressions," or what have you.

In the end, I think this unconscious hewing, over the years, to strive for a kind of stylistic consistency in my work has helped set it apart, in a good way.

Cheers...

P.S. Written while Word is "trying to recover" my information.