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- Impression Hints and Tips
- 4.6
- Here are a few more hints and tips mostly from the editor’s dabblings in
- preparing the magazine...
- 4.6
- • Dashes − If you, like me, don’t like to see hyphens used where dashes
- should be used − i.e. in places like this − you will probably be sick
- and fed up of typing <alt-153>. (Note that the character in “alt-153” is
- a hyphen, just in case you weren’t aware of the difference.) If you are
- importing text into Impression, occurrences of ‘hyphen hyphen’ will be
- converted automatically by Impression into a long dash — see what I
- mean. Personally, I prefer the shorter one so what I have done is set up
- the abbreviation dictionary with ‘expand as you type’ and used an
- underline character to be turned into a dash. The only drawback is that
- it’s OK for things like the dashes earlier in this paragraph, but if,
- for example, you use dashes in phone numbers, as 0603−766592, the
- abbreviation technique does not work and you are back to <alt-153>.
- Anyone any other ideas?
- 4.6
- • Find styles − If you want to find a style, get up the find/replace box
- with <ctrl-f4> and then click in the menu box to the right of the Find
- box and select the style you are looking for. This will come up as, say,
- “”. Type an “@” after this − which stands for “any text” − and then
- press <return>. This will highlight the whole of the first piece of text
- with that style or effect. Unfortunately, the facility to replace that
- style with another style is not yet working. If you do want to do any
- search and replace on the style names, export the text, with styles, and
- then use another WP such as !Edit to do the searching and replacing
- before returning it to Impression.
- 4.6
- • Rogue effects − Someone sent me a file in which they had used a
- particular font which I did not have so when I loaded the file,
- Impression told me it was changing it to Trinity.medium. I did an edit-
- style and looked at all the style definitions to no avail. Eventually, I
- realised that it must have been used as an effect, so how was I to find
- it and eliminate it or change it to some font I did possess? Because the
- font had been changed to Trinity.medium (i.e. the BaseStyle font) I
- could not pick it out with a visual scan so the first idea was to change
- the BaseStyle to, say, Zapf.Dingbats so that anything which was in a
- different font was obviously an effect or a style. Unfortunately, this
- didn’t reveal the offending effect. At this point, I became convinced
- that I had a non-existent, un-removable effect, i.e. a bug in Impres
- sion. So I sent the offending file to CC who informed me that the
- particular effect WAS in the text and they also showed me how to locate
- it... as follows...
- 4.6
- (Actually, the reason that I couldn’t find the effect was that I had
- already gone through the document adding extra styles and had covered
- this rogue font-change effect with a font-change style of my own. In
- other words, the style, because it was applied later than the effect,
- took precedence.)
- 4.6
- • Finding effects − In the same way that you can find styles (see above)
- you can also find effects as long as you tell Impression that you want
- effects to be shown on the style menu. To do this, locate the file “UK”
- in the Impression “Resources” directory. Load it into !Edit and find
- “Cnf1:” and change it to “Cnf1:E” − that’s a one, not a letter “l”. Save
- the file and shut down and re-start Impression. You then will have
- effects on your style menus and search on {“effectname” }@, as explained
- above.
- 4.6
- • Fast search and replace − There are a couple of very useful keyboard
- short-cuts not documented in the manual which speed up the search and
- replace. When the “text found” box is on screen, <ctrl-R> does a
- “Replace” and <ctrl-N> moves to the “Next”.
- 4.6
- • Keyboard short-cuts − Apart from the ones listed on pages 119ff of the
- Impression manual, here are a few more: (some are mentioned on the menu,
- but not in manual)
- 4.6
- <ctrl-shift-D> go to chapter
- 4.6
- <ctrl-shift-H> produces a bullet i.e. a “•”.
- 4.6
- <ctrl-shift-I> also produces a bullet i.e. a “•”!
- 4.6
- <ctrl-shift-J> produces superscript
- 4.6
- <ctrl-shift-K> produces subscript
- 4.6
- <ctrl-shift-T> save text story
- 4.6
- • Page number justification problems − Some of you may have had
- difficulty getting correct centring or right justification of page
- numbers on footers. This is corrected in version 2.09 − well, almost!
- The footers on right hand pages were wrong last month, when I was using
- version 2.05, (in fact I didn’t even notice!) and the footers on the
- left hand pages would have been wrong this month (with 2.09) if I had
- not found a way round it. If you try to have left aligned page number
- with a right tabbed piece of text, the text suffers a left shift. I’ve
- solved it for now by splitting the footer text into two separate frames,
- one left aligned and the other right aligned. It’s messy, but it works.
- A
- 4.6
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