माइक्रोसोफ्ट वर्ड में ड्रौईंग्स बनाना सीखें (अङ्ग्रेज़ी में)

How to Make Elegant Drawings in Microsoft Wordby Len Fellman

[email protected] http://lenfellman.home.comcast.net

CONTENTS

I . Setting Options, and customizing the Drawing toolbar

II . The drawing grid. Aligning and distributing shapes

III . Lines, arrows, and autoshapes

IV . Using freeforms to create custom curves

V . The three layers of a Word document. Inline vs . floating shapes. Wrapping shapes around text. The Select Multiple Objects dialog box

VI . Grouping and order of shapes

VII . Transforming and enhancement of shapes

VIII . Using Autocorrect to store custom drawings

IX . Textboxes, callouts, and other text containers. Label boxes for drawings

X . Word Art and 3D drawings

XI . Converting documents to HTML and Adobe Acrobat formats

How to Make Elegant Drawings in Microsoft Word Page 1 of 23

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I. Setting Options, and customizing the Drawing toolbar.

RECOMMENDED OPTIONS

Under Tools, Options (Alt-t o), set the following:

“View” tab: Print and Web Layout Options—check Drawings and Object Anchors“General” tab: If you are using Word 2002, UNcheck “Automatically create Drawing Canvas when inserting AutoShapes”(The Drawing Canvas is a new feature in Word 2002, designed to make it easy to create a complex shape. I have yet to discover any value to it, and find it to be simply a nuisance.)“Edit” tab: Check “Enable click and type”. This may be useful when you are working with a drawing, since it allows you to position text in relation to the drawing without hitting the Enter key repeatedly.If you are using Word 2002, I recommend unchecking “Show Paste Option Buttons”. These buttons get in the way, and even sneak there way into one’s web documents!

NOTE: DRAWINGS CAN ONLY BE VIEWED WHEN YOU ARE IN “PRINT LAYOUT” (OR “WEB LAYOUT”) VIEW, NOT WHEN YOU ARE IN SO-CALLED “NORMAL” VIEW.

In the menu bar, Tools, Autocorrect (Options), check “Replace text as you type.”


Customizing the Drawing Toolbar

To display the Drawing toolbar, click your right-mouse button on the grey area at the top of the window, which will bring down the Toolbars menu. Check “Drawing”.

I like to have certain buttons displayed on my toolbar. To put buttons onto the toolbar, you need to customize the toolbar: Click the right-mouse button on the grey area at the top of the window and choose the bottom-most item: Customize (You can just press the “c” key).

Click the Commands tab at the top of the dialog box, and under Categories click “Drawing”. You may then drag icons from the Commands list at the right onto the Drawing toolbar.

Here are the buttons I recommend putting on the toolbar:Function:

Select Objects Drag cursor over shapes to select themSelect Multiple Objects Opens a window with a list of shapes in the doc.

Group Makes selected shapes into a single shapeUngroup Breaks up a grouped shape into its componentsRegroup Undoes “Ungroup”Bring to Front Puts shape on top of other shapes in same layerSend to Back Puts shape under other shapes in same layerBring in Front of Text Puts shape into the main drawing layerSend Behind Text Puts shape into the behind-text drawing layerFree Rotate Displays four shape rotation handlesRotate Left Rotates shape 90° counterclockwiseRotate Right Rotates shape 90° clockwiseFlip Horizontal Reflects shape in its horizontal center lineFlip Vertical Reflects shape in its vertical center lineEdit Points Allows editing of nodes and segments of a

freeform Curve Draws a freeform using cubic Bezier curvesLine Line segmentArrow Line segment with arrow head at endDouble Arrow Line segment with arrow head at both endsRectangle Rectangle AutoshapeIsosceles Triangle Adjustable triangle with base angles 90°Oval Oval (ellipse) Autoshape (with Shift key: a circle)


Arc Draws one quadrant of an ellipse (with Shift: circle)

Right Brace Adjustable brace AutoshapeCrop Tool for cropping pictures: useful with “Print

Scrn”Text Box If text is selected, it goes into the text boxWord Art Create stylized, rotate-able text

In addition to these, you should have the following “pop-up” menus:Function:

Draw ▼ Miscellaneous tools: some are on the toolbar.

AutoShapes ▼ Lines, freeforms, geom. shapes, callouts, etc.

Drawing Grid Dialog box for “Snap objects” and gridlines ▼ Fill Color Fill shape with color, or make fill invisible ▼ Font Color ▼ Line Color Line Style Adjust line thickness or multiplicity Dash Style Arrow Style Choose arrowheads for one or both ends of line Shadow Style Give shapes a 3-D effect 3-D Style Turn Autoshapes into 3-D objects

HOW TO SAVE THESE SETTINGSThese changes are all stored in a “template” file called normal.dot. If you want to

transfer the settings from one computer to another, you have to move this file to the appropriate directory on the target computer. Here is where normal.dot resides:In Windows 98: C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\TemplatesIn Windows NT, 2000, or XP: Here you have to provide a “profile” name (“my name”):C:\Documents and Settings\(my name)\WINDOWS\ Application Data\Microsoft\TemplatesBatch files to make this process easier are available on my web site. Put them on a floppy disk. Then go to the Start Menu, Run.To copy from Windows 98 to a floppy, type: A:\NormalDotWin98ToATo copy from a floppy to Windows 98, type: A:\NormalDotAToWin98To copy from Windows 2000 or XP to a floppy, type:


A:\NormalDotWinNTToA “myname”To copy from a floppy to Windows 2000 or XP, type:

A:\NormalDotAToWinNT “myname”(“my name” is your profile name).


ACCELERATOR KEYS (“HOT KEYS”)

Be aware of the “accelerator keys” for accessing menu items: these are shown by the underlined letters in the menu names and the menu items. For example, the Draw menu contains a feature called “Change AutoShape”. The Draw menu can be accessed by typing Alt-r. To change a shape (a textbox, for example) to one of the other “Basic shapes”, type Alt-r c b and select the desired shape.

A keystroke sequence I use frequently is Alt-r g to Group two or more shapes. Similarly Alt-r u to Ungroup a grouped shape, and Alt-r o to Regroup a previously ungrouped set of shapes.

In this document, we always underline the accelerator characters when we refer to the menu items to encourage the reader to make use of them. This is part of the…

BASIC RULES FOR EFFICIENT COMPUTER USE

Some tasks can be performed more efficiently with the mouse, and some can be done more efficiently with the keyboard. Always use the most efficient tool for the job.

If there is a task you perform often, learn the fast way to do it. When you learn the fast way, you will feel empowered by it, and will find that task satisfying.


II. The drawing grid. Aligning and distributing shapes

The Drawing Grid dialog box is accessed by clicking the icon on the Drawing toolbar, or the Grid command on the Draw pop-up menu (Alt-r i). It gives you access to an invisible grid which you can use to align your drawings. The default setting “Snap to Grid” causes your shapes to jump around in strange ways until you either uncheck this setting, or check the Display gridlines on screen option so you can see the lines your shapes are “snapping” to. You can also set the spacing of the horizontal or vertical lines on your grid.

EXERCISE: Check “Snap objects to grid”, set the grid spacing to 12 points in both directions, and check “Display gridlines on screen”. Using the Rectangle AutoShape, make a 10 × 10 square. Fill the shape with 10 horizontal and 10 vertical lines.

EXERCISE: Experiment with “Snap objects to other objects”, and see where this might be useful.

Displaying the gridlines makes them visible on the screen only: they can’t be made to appear in the printed document.

For making mathematical drawings, I don’t use “Snap objects to grid”, or the related option: “Snap objects to other objects”. These settings prevent the free placement of parts of a drawing. An alternative to “Snapping” shapes is the “Align Left / Center / Right / Top / Middle / Bottom” and the “Distribute Horizontally / Vertically” features.(Alt-r a). These are useful for aligning shapes that are used with a numbered set of problems (especially when using multiple columns), or for lining up shapes like the icons that appear in Topic I above.

Another way to organize shapes on a page is by placing them in a table. A shape created while the cursor is in a table cell belongs to that cell. However if you move that shape, the connection between the shape and the table is broken. To restore the connection:a) Place the shape where you want it and (with it selected) do Ctrl-x (“cut”)b) place the cursor in the desired cellc) do Ctrl-v (“paste”) to paste the shape back into the document. It will probably re-appear in the same position as before, but will now be part of the cell.


III. Lines, arrows, and Autoshapes

The line tool produces ordinary line segments. Such a line can be adjusted by dragging the endpoints, or changed into a one- or two-headed arrow using the Arrow Style dialog box. It can also be made thick or multiple, and dashed or dotted, using the dialog boxes for these features. It can be colored using the Line Color dialog box.

If you hold the shift key down while producing the line, the line will “snap” to an

inclination of 0◦, 15◦, 30◦, etc., so you can make it exactly horizontal or vertical. However once the line is in place there is no easy way to get the line exactly horizontal or vertical unless you have a steady hand or you use the “Snap to grid” feature.

Autoshapes are ready-made shapes, the most important of which are standard geometrical objects. Some of them have one or two (rarely more than two) “adjustment handles” for modifying the shape. I have found the following ones the most useful, and keep them on my toolbar:

Line, Arrow, Double Arrow, Rectangle, Isosceles Triangle, Oval, Arc, Curve, Right Brace

A rectangle is almost the same thing as a text box: you can add text to a rectangle just like a text box: in fact, you can add text to (almost) any Autoshape (right mouse button, Add Text). One difference is that a rectangle can be rotated, while a text box can’t be. However, rotating the shape doesn’t rotate the text. (To get rotating text, see topic X. below: “Word Art”.)

The “Isosceles Triangle” Autoshape is mis-named: it starts out as an isosceles triangle, but using the adjustment handle you can change it into any shape triangle you like. If you want an obtuse triangle, the obtuse angle will be on the vertex opposite the base. The triangle can be rotated if you want one of the base angles to be obtuse.

By moving the adjustment handle all the way to one side, you can make a right triangle. For this reason, I don’t need the Right Triangle Autoshape on my toolbar.

More often you will make triangles by double-clicking the line tool so you can make one line after the other quickly. After making the figure, group it into a single shape (see Topic VI).

The drawback to this method is that the shaped can’t be filled with a color.


Other geometric Autoshapes worthy of commenting on are: Parallelogram. Using the sizing handle, this can be converted to a rectangle. Trapezoid. Unfortunately, this tool produces only isosceles trapezoids. Diamond. This is actually a rhombus, but one whose diagonals are horizontal and vertical (unless you rotate it). Rounded rectangle. Using the sizing handle, this can be anything between a proper rectangle and a “racetrack”. Hexagon. This is really a truncated rectangle, and can be made into anything from a bevelled shape to a diamond. Made with the Ctrl key held down, it makes a regular hexagon. Octagon. Similar to hexagon: really a truncated rectangle. Pentagon. This is a regular pentagon only: it has no adjustment handles.

Arc. When one is first created, you get one quadrant of an ellipse. If you hold the Shift key down while dragging, you get a quadrant of a circle.

The arc tool has two adjustment handles, one for each end of the arc.There is a secret to making an arc: ALWAYS START BY MAKING A FULL

QUARTER-CIRCLE ARC WHOSE CENTER COINCIDES WITH THE CENTER OF THE ARC YOU ARE LOOKING FOR. Then drag the adjustment handles to give the arc its desired span.

The following picture will help you understand this process:

The trick is to begin a quadrant arc on the y-axis of an imaginary coordinate system whose center is the center of the arc you want. Swing it around to the imaginary x-axis.If you don’t do this, and attempt to make the arc directly, it usually won’t have the right center.


Begin these two arcs here.

Begin these two arcs here.

You may want to stick a small arrow at the end of your arc, and group it with the arc.

EXERCISE: Make the following drawing:

EXERCISE: Make this one:Note: You won’t succeed unless you follow the above directions very carefully!

The Right Brace Autoshape is very useful for displaying measurements on a drawing.It can be rotated into the desired position, or flipped vertically. Use it grouped with a textbox. (See exercise in Topic VII.)


Final arc construction:

Beginning of an arc construction:

Start arc here

There are three important tools for using Autoshapes:

Holding the Shift key down while creating the shape locks the aspect ratio. (I.e. the length-to-width ratio). You can make a circle by holding the Shift key down while dragging the Oval Autoshape, and a circular arc using the Arc Autoshape.

You can also lock the aspect ratio after making a shape: Do right mouse button, “Format Autoshape”, click the “Size” tab, and check “Lock Aspect Ratio”. The shape from then on will maintain its length-to-width ratio when you drag its sizing handles. (Although I have seen this feature fail.)

Holding the Control (Ctrl) key down while creating a shape (including line segments) makes the shape appear from the center out rather than from an end or a corner. If you want an oval inscribed in an existing rectangle, you can begin in a corner of the rectangle, but if you want an oval with a known center, use Ctrl and begin in the center.

If you double-click an Autoshape icon, you can create multiple instances of that shape. This is particularly useful with the Line tool. Note that this only works with icons appearing on the toolbar: it won’t work with icons selected from the Autoshape pop-up menu. This is one reason why you should have certain shapes on the Drawing toolbar.

EXERCISE: Try these.


IV. Using freeforms to create custom curves

There are three tools for making freeform curves: Curve, Freeform, and Scribble (see AutoShapes, Lines), but of these only Curve is suitable for serious drawing. The Curve tool creates a series of “cubic Bezier curves”, pieced together. As you trace the curve with the mouse, every time you release and press the left mouse button, you get a new segment of the curve. If you end up within a few pixels of where you started, you will get a closed curve.

The segments are separated by points called “nodes”, which can be manipulated by clicking the “Edit Points” icon on the Drawing toolbar, or by right-clicking the curve and choosing “Edit Points”.

With a little practice you can make fairly accurate curves this way. I like to paste graphs into Word from graphing programs like David Meredith’s (X)PLORE program http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~meredith/X(PLORE)/xplorepg.html, and trace them with the curve tool in order to produce an Autoshape that I can use with other drawing elements, or to make custom graphs to be stored in my Autocorrect entries (see VI.).

EXERCISE: The following graph was created in X(PLORE). Trace the sine wave with the Curve tool to make a Freeform. Remember that every time you release and re-press the left mouse button, you get a new node and a new segment of the freeform. In places where the curve is fairly straight, the nodes can be far apart, but where there is greater curvature you want nodes fairly close together.

When you are finished, delete the original picture, and fine-tune your drawing using “Edit Points”.


http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~meredith/X(PLORE)/xplorepg.html

EXERCISE: Shading Areas Under CurvesWe will create the shaded area shown below, using a freeform.

Zoom in on the graph to 150% (View Menu, Zoom, or the Zoom drop-down box in the Standard Menu). Trace the boundary of the region using the Curve tool. Use ONLY ONE segment for each straight part of the boundary. These segments won’t be straight, but we’ll fix that later. Now adjust the two top corner nodes: Go to “Edit Points”, hold the mouse pointer over each one of them in turn and click the right mouse button. Choose the option “Corner point”. A corner point has two adjustment handles that you can use to make the curve fit the contour you’re after. Do this. You will find that the three segments that are supposed to be straight bulge out. Still in “Edit Points”, hold the mouse pointer over each one of them in turn and click the right mouse button. You will find an option: “Straight segment”. That will straighten out the bulge. Finally use the Fill Color tool to shade the interior of the freeform. Go back to the 100% Zoom setting. Group the freeform with the rest of the drawing. (Hold the shift key down to select both objects together. Use Alt-r-g to group them.)


V. The three layers of a Word document. Inline vs. floating shapes. Wrapping shapes around text. The Select Multiple Objects dialog box

A Microsoft Word document appears to be two-dimensional, but should really be thought of as three planes on top of one another. The main part of the document is the middle plane of the three: the text layer. Sitting on top of that is the in-front-of-text drawing layer. When you make an Autoshape or a Textbox, it appears in this layer, and is said to “float over the text”. It you create it or drag it over the text, it hides the text, unless you set its Fill Color (see icon on Drawing toolbar) to “No Fill”. However, another option is to put the shape into the third layer: the behind-text drawing layer. The commands “Send Behind Text” and “Bring in Front of Text” (see the icons on the toolbar) govern this.

Shapes that appear in one of the two drawing layers are called “floating” shapes. In addition to these, some types of drawings or pictures can be displayed as “inline” shapes.An inline shape resides in the text layer of the document, and is treated as one large character.

Pictures pasted into Word from other applications (or screen shots) are displayed as Inline shapes in Word 2000 by default, but as floating shapes in Word 2002.

Autoshapes can only be floating shapes.To change a floating shape to Inline when possible, do: Draw menu, Text

Wrapping, In Line with Text (Alt-t i).To change an Inline shape to floating, do: Draw menu, Text Wrapping, and select

one of the wrapping styles: Square, Tight, Top and Bottom, or Through. (These options are also available in the Format Object or Format Autoshape Dialog

box, “Layout” tab, found at the bottom of the View menu, or by right-clicking the shape.)


I have one comment to make about Text Wrapping: IT ALMOST NEVER WORKS!!!It’s better in Word 2002 than in Word 2000, but still doesn’t work consistently.Once in a while I actually succeed in getting text to wrap around a shape or a textbox as advertised, but it usually decides to stop working for long periods of time. I have yet to discover what is causing this.

What to do when Text Wrapping doesn’t work Send your shape Behind Text (see icon on Drawing toolbar). Set the Fill Color to “No Fill” (icon on toolbar). Do your text wrapping manually, by simply inserting spaces as needed. You will now discover that you sometimes can’t get at the shape to select it, or get at your textbox to edit its text! Do deal with this, learn about…

The “Select Multiple Objects” dialog box

When you click the “Select Multiple Objects” icon on the Drawing toolbar, you will bring up a dialog box listing all the floating shapes (including textboxes) in your document. If you are having trouble selecting a shape that is behind the text or behind another shape, try to locate it in this list and select it (using the mouse or the spacebar).It will be easy to find if it was recently created: it will appear near the bottom of the list. You can select or de-select as many shapes as you want to this way.


VI. Grouping and order of shapes. Anchors

Anchors

Every shape has an “Anchor”. This is a range of text that governs how the shape moves when the text of the document changes. The idea is that the shape should remain in the same position relative to its anchoring text, unless the user moves the shape manually.

I recommend always having the “Show Object Anchors” option on (Tools, Options, View, Object Anchors). An anchor can be dragged with the mouse, in order to reposition it. By default, the anchoring range is a full paragraph of text, and the anchor sits at the upper right corner of the anchoring paragraph.

Often when you create a drawing, the anchoring text will be an invisible paragraph mark or break character. If you delete that character, the drawing disappears with it. So you will want to move your anchor back to a visible paragraph. (If the anchor refuses to move, try moving the shape a little bit first. If you still can’t get the anchor where you want it, type (say) a period to create a new paragraph and move the anchor there.)

Of course you normally want the anchoring paragraph to be the one that actually discusses the drawing.

It is also possible to anchor a drawing to a single character (in the Format Object or Format Autoshape dialog box, go to Layout, Picture Position, Horizontal, Absolute Position). Doing so makes a floating shape behave similarly to an Inline shape.

The Z-Order

Every time a new shape is created, it goes to the top of the “Z-order”. The name Z-order comes from thinking of the Drawing Layer as an XY-coordinate system. The third dimension is called “Z”, and the drawings are thought of as piled up on top of one another in the Z dimension. Drawings farther down in the Z-order are covered up by the ones higher up, unless the latter are set to have No Fill (see Fill color icon).

You can change this order by clicking the “Bring to Front” or “Send to Back” icons, or by clicking “Bring Forward” or “Send Backward”. (Draw menu or right-mouse button: Order).

However, this scheme is complicated by the fact that there are two drawing layers: the “in-front-of-text” layer and the “behind-text” layer. If you move a shape from one layer to the other, its Z-order doesn’t change, but a drawing in front of text will always eclipse a drawing behind text, regardless of which one has the higher Z-order.


Grouping of shapes

You will never want to create a drawing out of multiple shapes without grouping them into a single shape. If you forget to do this, or leave one shape out of the group inadvertently, you won’t notice anything wrong until you move things around in the document and discover that one of your drawings came apart.

The key fact about selecting shapes: In order to select a shape, the mouse cursor must be over an actual part of the shape, either the Fill if there is one (the fill may be white and therefore not visible), or one of the LINES of the shape, but not over white space which doesn’t belong to the shape. You’ll know when the cursor is over the shape because it changes into a crossed-arrow symbol.

To make a grouped shape you need to be able to do multiple selections. There are three ways to do this: Hold the Shift key down while selecting the shapes one at a time with the mouse.This may not be possible if one shapes completely covers another one.Warning: when you double-click a drawing icon to make multiple shapes, you have to get OUT of that mode before you can get back to normal editing. Use the Esc key for the purpose. Drag the Select Objects arrow over all the shapes. This should select them all; even the ones that are covered up. However, I have found that this sometimes misses some of them.IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT THE SELECT OBJECTS ARROW:

When you are in “Select Objects” mode, the mouse cursor (not the selection cursor) turns into a thick white arrow. You won’t be able to type text while you are in this mode. You need to hit Esc to get out of Select Objects mode and go back to typing text. Pay attention to this! You’ll think you broke something otherwise.

You also see a white arrow mouse cursor when you point the mouse in the margins of your document, but that does not mean you are in Select Objects mode.

Select the shapes by checking them in the Select Multiple Objects dialog box. (You can use the spacebar to select them). This may not be easy to do since you may not be able to tell which shapes in the list are the ones you want; however it helps that the shapes appear in the list in the order that they were created.

Make a habit of testing your grouped shape by selecting it and dragging it a little bit with the mouse. If any part of the drawing didn’t make it into the group, you’ll catch


it that way. Hit Undo (Ctrl-z) and get the stray shape into the group.

You will find that grouped drawings sometimes don’t work right: things get covered up when you don’t expect them to. You may have to fiddle with (i) Bring to Front/Send to Back, (ii) Bring in Front of Text/ Send Behind Text, and (iii) No Fill before you can get all your objects and textboxes to appear without anything covered up.I’ve never failed to get it to work, but I can’t tell you exactly how I did it!

VII. Transforming and enhancement of shapes

Tools for transforming shapes are “Free Rotate”, “Rotate Left” (by 90°), “Rotate Right” (by 90°), “Flip Horizontal”, and “Flip Vertical”. You should experiment with these tools using one of the AutoShapes.

The Free Rotate tool brings up little green rotation handles at the four corners of the shape. In Word 2002 one rotation handle comes up automatically when the shape is selected, even without clicking Free Rotate. However, you will have better control of the rotation if you use Free Rotate.

If you rotate an AutoShape that contains text, the shape will rotate but the text won’t. You can only rotate text in “Word Art” (cf. Topic X.)

You may want to create an AutoShape, copy and paste it (Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v), and flip the copy horizontally or vertically. You can then position the original and the copy appropriately and group them together into a single shape.

EXERCISE: Use this technique to make this drawing starting with the Trapezoid AutoShape:

You should also experiment with Fill Color, Line Color, Line Style, and Dash Style, or even Shadow Style and 3-D Style (for the latter, see Topic X).

EXERCISE: Draw this →


VIII. Using the Autocorrect feature to store custom drawings

Examples of drawings you may want to store for frequent use are:

an xy-coordinate system: two perpendicular lines grouped with a text box (see VII.)

A number line or a grid for making graphs. To make these, open the Drawing Grid dialog box (Alt-r i) and check Snap objects to grid, and set the Horizontal and Vertical spacing to control the spacing of your parallel lines. (The closest you can get to no spacing in one direction is 0.5 points).

A curve made with the Curve freeform tool.EXERCISE: Above we created a cycle of a sine wave in the graphing program (X)PLORE, and copied and pasted it into Word. Try making an Autocorrect entry for this drawing, as explained below.It sometimes helps to Zoom in before tracing a curve, to get increased accuracy. (View menu, Zoom: Alt-v z, or use the Zoom drop-down box on the Standard Toolbar.)

A “label box” for adding labels to drawings (see IX below).

After making your custom drawing, group it into a single shape by dragging the Select Objects arrow over it and clicking the Group tool (Alt-r g). Then with the grouped drawing selected, go to Tools, Autocorrect (Alt-t a) and type in a keyboard shortcut in the Replace box. You will also have to check the Formatted Text box. Then every time you type the shortcut, you will get your graph or sine wave, or whatever you have created.

Be careful not to use a shortcut that might be used as an ordinary word. To be safe, I like to end the shortcut word with an underscore, as in “sinewave_”. (Microsoft Word treats “sinewave_” as a complete word, so you get the Autocorrect item without having to type a space character to signal the end of a word.)


IX. Textboxes, callouts, and other text containers. Label boxes for drawings

A textbox is a “floating” shape that can be positioned anywhere in your document. You can create it from scratch and then type text into it, or you can click the Textbox icon with text selected first, and the textbox will appear with the selected text inside of it (In Word 97 or 2000 you will have to adjust its size to fit the text. Also, there is a bug causing the last line sometimes to have the wrong font style. (Use the Format Painter—the paintbrush icon from the standard toolbar—to correct this.)

When you are working with a textbox, you need to be aware of the difference between selecting the textbox and selecting an insertion point in the text inside the textbox. If you see a blinking cursor in the textbox, you are in normal, text mode. But if you click the boundary of the box, you select the textbox itself. Only the presence or absence of the blinking cursor tells you the difference.

Text in a textbox (or in a table cell) can be displayed vertically (see the appropriate toolbar), but not at an angle. The only way to get text at an angle is by using “Word Art” (see X, below), or by pasting the text into a program like Adobe Photoshop and rotating it there; then inserting it back into Word as a picture. You will lose a lot of resolution doing this, but it works.

Other Text Containers. Callouts

Text boxes are very useful, but you may want to store shapes in other objects.Any AutoShape can be used as a text container (even the Bracket AutoShape, but that doesn’t usually give you what you want; you are better off grouping the Bracket with a Textbox). To do so, right click the AutoShape and choose “Add Text”.

Another type of text container is a “Callout”. They often look like balloons. Examples of callouts appear in Topic III. above, illustrating the use of the Arc AutoShape. To make a callout, go to the Drawing toolbar, Autoshapes, Callouts (Alt-u c). I find only the first four callout types useful. These have an adjustment handle for setting the pointer to the desired length and direction.

You can also change a textbox into a different shape (including a callout) as “an afterthought”: go to the Draw menu, Change AutoShape (Alt-r c).


HOW TO MAKE A LABEL BOX FOR DRAWINGS

Make a textbox a little larger than your typical drawing.

Select the textbox contents (a single paragraph mark), and choose a font for your labels. I have found that boldface font a few points smaller than the regular text size works best. So if my document uses 14 point font, I make my labels using 11 point, boldface type. When lecturing with an overhead projector, I use 18 point font, and my label boxes use 14 point.

Fill the textbox with space characters by holding down the spacebar until the cursor goes to the right side of the box; then hit the Enter key. Repeat until you get to the bottom of the box.

Click the boundary of the textbox to select it. Then hit the right mouse button to bring up a menu containing the option: Format Text Box. If you don’t see this option, you have text selected rather than the textbox itself.

In the Format Text Box dialog box, click the Colors and Lines tab and under Line choose “No Line”. Then click the Layout tab and choose: Send Behind Text.

(Note that all these settings are also available on the Drawing Toolbar.)

Go to AutoCorrect (Alt-t a) and type a name that you will use to bring up this special text box (for example: “label_”). Also be sure Formatted Text box is checked.

Now when you type the shortcut, the label box will appear. However, you won’t be able to see it! Since you made the lines and fill invisible, the box will only be visible when it is selected. If you know approximately where it is on the page and click the mouse there, you will see it. If that’s hard to do, click the Select Multiple Objects icon on the Drawing toolbar and check the last item on the list. That will be your label box.

Now anytime you make a drawing, type your Autocorrect shortcut (in my example: “label_”) to produce a label box, slip the box over your drawing, and type any desired labels inside it. Finally, group the label box with the rest of the drawing. (For this purpose, you may need to use the Select Multiple Objects dialog box.)


X. Word Art and 3D drawings

At first glance, Word Art appears to be only for fun, rather than for serious things like mathematical drawings. However, it has the virtue of providing rotatable text. Since a Word Art object is a floating shape, it can be grouped with a drawing to provide text that rotates with the drawing. For an example of this use, download my file of Rulers and Protractors.

Word Art can be in any font that you have on your computer, but the only font styles it supports are Bold and Italic, as well as Subscript. That severely limits its uses for mathematical documents. (However, in the Rulers and Protractors document, you will find what appear to be Word Art superscripts. Each superscript is actually a separate Word Object, with its shape positioned above the base line Word Art object, and grouped with it.)

You can turn existing text into Word Art by selecting it and clicking the Word Art icon on the Drawing toolbar. Or you can start with the Word Art dialog box and enter text there.

3D Shapes

Most Autoshapes (and textboxes) can be turned into 3D shapes. When it is possible, the “3-D Style” icon will be available on the Drawing toolbar. Besides being able to choose the type of 3D perspective, you will find a “3-D settings” toolbar available via this icon, allowing you to tilt the 3D object, and change its depth, direction, color, surface type, and lighting.

You may want to use 3D to liven up a presentation, or to create standard geometric solids. (Not a sphere, however: to get a sphere, you will have to make a circle as an outer boundary, and then group together a set of ovals to indicate longitude and latitude lines).


XI. Converting documents to HTML and Adobe Acrobat formats

You can save any Word document as a web page, but if it contains drawings, the result will usually not be very satisfactory: the drawings themselves will carry over satisfactorily, but the positioning of the drawings will usually be messed up. Grouped drawings may not display properly.

Be aware that HTML needs a little bit more space for drawings than Word does.So if you fill up a page tightly in Word (as I too often do), it may spill over into a second page, and your drawings might get pushed around. So leave extra space.

In addition, most Word field codes (such as are used for mathematical formatting) won’t translate properly. The latest version of MathType (the full-featured version of Equation Editor, which sells for around $100 in the academic version) does some translating of mathematical text into HTML, but it still fails to translate everything.

I have found that I get much better mathematical documents by converting Word files into Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format. The software for doing this is available for around $70 with academic pricing from EdTech http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~edweb/ or from Gradware www.gradware.com .

You will find many examples of this on my class websites, accessible through http://lenfellman.home.comcast.net

I have generally found Adobe Acrobat to work fine, but there have been times when I get a maddening message: “Unable to create .pdf file”, with no explanation as to why. A look at the “Error log” sometimes gives a clue: it usually has to do with text in textboxes going past the right or bottom edge of the box. If you use label boxes as described in Topic IX. above, you will need to pay attention to this. Shapes that get to close to the edge of the page can also cause problems.

Sometimes grouped shapes don’t translate correctly into Adobe. I have usually been able to correct this by fiddling with “No Fill”, “Send Behind Text”, “Send to Back”, etc. But a few times I have had to settle for leaving the shapes ungrouped before converting a doc to .pdf.

I have never had a problem with .pdf files that I didn’t eventually fix.


http://lenfellman.home.comcast.net/

http://www.gradware.com/

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~edweb/