Software

Fixing correctly “misspelled” words in a Word 2010 document

Dave Farquhar Office, Software

While I’m on the subject of Word 2010 weirdness, this week I had to deal with a document that had a number of misspelled words–except they weren’t misspelled. Word was insisting that, for example, the word “Change” was actually “hange,” and flagging it as misspelled and miscapitalized.

The one thing all of these non-errors had in common was that they weren’t the original beginning of the sentence, but now they were.

Word seemed to take issue with the way a previous editor had capitalized the word. When I deleted the entire word and retyped it, correctly spelled and capitalized, Word’s spelling and grammar check accepted it. Accepting those specific changes also made the problem go away.

Fixing a Word 2010 table of contents that updates with incorrect pages

Dave Farquhar Office, Software

I had an issue with a Word 2010 document whose table of contents entries were ridiculously off–entries being on page 45 of a 24-page document, for example.

The problem appeared to be due to track changes. The pages it was putting in the table of contents seemed to correspond with the page numbers of the marked-up document. Unfortunately, the only way I found to fix the issue was to accept all the changes in the document, but after I did that, the table of contents updated correctly.

A fast way to turn lots of images into an Adobe Acrobat PDF file

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , , , , ,

I have a collection of magazine scans that, inconveniently, came as a series of JPG images rather than as PDFs that are more conducive to reading. I wanted PDFs, so I found a way to turn lots of images into an Adobe Acrobat PDF file.

Building the PDF manually took a good 30 minutes per issue, so I wanted a faster way. Using command-line tools, I was able to convert the entire collection (about 40 issues) in less than 30 minutes. Read more

Cutting Apache preforks seems to help small web servers

Dave Farquhar Apache, Linux, Software ,

I’ve had a ton of downtime this week (this seems to be the busy time of year for my web server), but I think I traced the problem to a known issue.

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Ars Technica: 64-bit Firefox on Windows needs to be a priority

Dave Farquhar security, Software , ,

Ars Technica said yesterday that Mozilla needs to make 64-bit Firefox on Windows a high priority. I agree with this completely. With web browsers, you can’t have too much security, and Firefox on Windows is a big target.
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A skeptic looks at Libre Office

Dave Farquhar Software , ,

Since MS Office 2003 turns into a pumpkin in April 2014 or so, I decided maybe it’s time to start looking at alternatives. I’ve looked at Open Office off and on over the years but its sluggish performance always turned me off. But I thought I’d give Libre Office, the successor, a look.

And now that I’ve lived with Office 2010, I don’t find Libre Office 3.6 all that bad.

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Do as we say, not as we did: Microsoft and standards

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , ,

Microsoft is sniveling that mobile web sites are written with Webkit browsers in mind, because Webkit has 90% market share on tablets and phones.

For those who are over 30, the irony is nauseating. Read more

How abandonware gets abandoned

Dave Farquhar Copyright, Retro Computing, Software , , , , , ,

From time to time on classic computing and/or videogaming forums, the question of how to track down the current copyright holder to a particular given title comes up. Sometimes someone knows the answer. Frequently they don’t.

This week, when George Lucas announced he’d sold Lucasfilm to Disney, illustrated precisely how this kind of thing happens.

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Hide and unhide whitespace, headers and footers in Microsoft Word

Dave Farquhar Office, Software , ,

For now at least, I edit a lot of security documents as part of my job. Today, I saw something I hadn’t seen before: Word 2010 was hiding all of the headers, footers, and whitespace in the document. That made navigating the document a whole lot faster and easier, but it also meant I couldn’t verify that the headers and footers were correct. I figured out how to hide and unhide whitespace, headers and footers in Microsoft Word.

The solution was simple but non-obvious, and works in all versions of Word that I know of. Read more

How to fix blank table of contents entries in Word

Dave Farquhar Office, Software , ,

A system security document I was editing had blank table of contents entries in Word. This was in Word 2010, but my research indicated it can happen in Word 2007, 2003, and very possibly earlier versions as well.

Since the table of contents is often the first impression of the document, you want to get it right. Many readers will assume that if the table of contents has errors, the rest of the document will too. They may be wrong, but you may not get a chance to prove it.

The particular document I was looking at had two blank entries in the table of contents. When I clicked on the links, they led to the entries right below them in the TOC, making them completely extraneous.
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