Replies

Thanks, jscher. I never would have thought of that. It works beautifully for inserting the TBD codes!
If anyone out there does know how to do REFs to this { QUOTE TBD{ =({ SEQ TBD * ARABIC }) # “000” } * MERGEFORMAT } field, I would appreciate hearing from you because it would simplify my TBD summary table.

I’d like to thank all who responded to my request for the special kind of change counting. Jekyl makes a good point that my management may be overemphasizing the numerical solution and should concentrate on more practical ways to impress the client (a military one, I might add). But I do think that their request for software that reports how 2 documents differ “realistically” (i.e., by ignoring insignificant/incidental changes) is a valid one. In fact the more I think about it the more I’m surprised such a tool doesn’t already exist.
I am going to try Jekyl’s recommendation, DeltaView, next, and maybe CompareRite (or Compare Plug-in?).
Thanks, Stuart, I tried to use your code but since I’m not a VBA expert I got errors. Nor could I tell what the code was designed to do.
Macropod, if I’m reading your “compensating deletions” workaround correctly, it seems to require a lot of effort when dealing with autonumbered figures and tables, and wouldn’t be possible to apply to old documents. Please correct me if I’m wrong about these inferences.
Jscher, I’m still looking into your binary file compare suggestion.

I’d like to thank all who responded to my request for the special kind of change counting. Jekyl makes a good point that my management may be overemphasizing the numerical solution and should concentrate on more practical ways to impress the client (a military one, I might add). But I do think that their request for software that reports how 2 documents differ “realistically” (i.e., by ignoring insignificant/incidental changes) is a valid one. In fact the more I think about it the more I’m surprised such a tool doesn’t already exist.
I am going to try Jekyl’s recommendation, DeltaView, next, and maybe CompareRite (or Compare Plug-in?).
Thanks, Stuart, I tried to use your code but since I’m not a VBA expert I got errors. Nor could I tell what the code was designed to do.
Macropod, if I’m reading your “compensating deletions” workaround correctly, it seems to require a lot of effort when dealing with autonumbered figures and tables, and wouldn’t be possible to apply to old documents. Please correct me if I’m wrong about these inferences.
Jscher, I’m still looking into your binary file compare suggestion.

After evaluating DiffDoc and talking to their developers, it turns out that the package can’t count changes the way I need it to. A typical example: A document has five figures in it. If the only change I make is to insert a new figure at the beginning of the document, it will become the new Figure 1. I consider that I have made only one change, even though old Figures 1 through 5 have been renumbered as Figures 2 through 6. DiffDoc counts this situation as 6 total changes (it includes all of the incidental renumberings as changes), and they tell me it can’t be reconfigured to ignore the “incidental” changes. Any quality process I implement using such change counts will be seriously flawed, especially with my large documents. Anyone out there got any suggestions?

After evaluating DiffDoc and talking to their developers, it turns out that the package can’t count changes the way I need it to. A typical example: A document has five figures in it. If the only change I make is to insert a new figure at the beginning of the document, it will become the new Figure 1. I consider that I have made only one change, even though old Figures 1 through 5 have been renumbered as Figures 2 through 6. DiffDoc counts this situation as 6 total changes (it includes all of the incidental renumberings as changes), and they tell me it can’t be reconfigured to ignore the “incidental” changes. Any quality process I implement using such change counts will be seriously flawed, especially with my large documents. Anyone out there got any suggestions?

Thanks, Ron for the info on the Diff Doc tool! It’s loaded with features and can probably do what I need it to do.

Thanks, Ron for the info on the Diff Doc tool! It’s loaded with features and can probably do what I need it to do.

Thanks, jscher. My customer wasn’t satisfied with Acrobat’s RTF conversion capability.
It turns out that the reason Drake was converting only every other page was because it was a demo version designed to do exactly that! After my customer realized this, he decided to go ahead and purchase the complete product from BCL.
I am interested in hearing from anyone who has used Drake, or who is familiar with any other product that does good PDF -to-Word conversions.

Thanks, jscher. My customer wasn’t satisfied with Acrobat’s RTF conversion capability.
It turns out that the reason Drake was converting only every other page was because it was a demo version designed to do exactly that! After my customer realized this, he decided to go ahead and purchase the complete product from BCL.
I am interested in hearing from anyone who has used Drake, or who is familiar with any other product that does good PDF -to-Word conversions.

Sorry for getting around to viewing your post so late. Some months back I designed a template that does what you asked for. I’ve attached the .doc version for you. It uses Headings 1-5 for the chapters and Headings 6-9 for the appendices.

Clarification to my previous post: The caption will appear to be on two lines in Normal and Print Layout views only if you have specified hidden text to display (Tools-Options-View tab (Formatting marks)-Hidden Text). If you don’t specify hidden text to display, the Normal and Print Layout views will correctly show the entire caption on one line as it should.

I just tested this wonderful Klaus-Nancy workaround and it works beautifully. I’ve also had a need to do this with table captions and was going to ask the same question myself.
The “return” Nancy mentions is a press of the Enter key. Select the paragraph mark that results, and format it as Hidden text through the Font dialog.
I found that if I added a space before the hidden “return”, I got a better result (the two parts of the caption didn’t run together).
The caption will in fact appear on two lines in Normal and Print Layout views, but Word is lying to you. You’ll notice that Print Preview correctly shows it all on one line.

Andrew,
Thanks for catching that! You’re right, I had the “repeat” style assigned to the captions for Tables 2-2 and 3-2, instead of the Caption style.
You have saved me a whole lot of time and aggravation. Thanks again!

Andrew,
Your suggestion to create a style (I called it FigCapRpt for “figure caption repeat”) worked beautifully!
However, when I tried to do the same for the List of Tables (I created a new style called TabCapRpt), a strange thing happened. The table captions immediately following the last

FYI, my additional testing indicates that only the “c” switch is needed in the SEQ field to get the figure number in the caption to repeat. The “s1” doesn’t appear to be necessary.