Re: Advice please on Styles for cross-platform?

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Hi Graham:

For the ultimate cross-platform experience, *Leave the damned things alone*
is the best advise.

We have a whole website here: www.word.mvps.org It does not really discuss
cross-platform issues, because we're too lazy! We tend to say "produce a
*good* Word document and it will 'just work' with no issues cross-platform.
Produce a badly-formatted document and it will blow up in either place."
You're on the right track with "Styles". If you do all of your formatting
with Styles, you will get very few problems. If users employ direct
formatting, they're in trouble before they leave home!

On both platforms, Microsoft Word has around 140 built-in styles, and around
40 included fonts.

The fonts included on the Macintosh version have been re-coded to
Microsoft's specifications (or by Microsoft Typography, in many cases) to
match as closely as possible their PC equivalents.

So Rule 1: Use the built-in styles, customising the font sizes and leading
for your purpose.

Rule 2: Use the fonts Microsoft provided. Fonts of the same name provided
by other companies may/will produce varying results.

Rule 3: Forget bullets and numbering. Bullets and numbering attached to
the Heading and List-series styles by someone who knows what they are doing,
following Shauna Kelly's methods http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/index.html
will arrive and work fine on the Mac.

But unless you define the numbering into the style exactly right, it will
blow up when it crosses platform and you will get switches (often, numbers
turn to bullets or vice versa). Again: if you know what you are doing, you
can fix it in seconds by re-associating the list template with the style.
End users who have not been trained will break it every time :-)

Use of PC fonts on the Mac is quite OK, but be aware that the hinting is
wrong for the Mac display so they will look bad on-screen. Just drag TTF or
OTF fonts into one of the OS X font folders and they will work.

Going the other way, from Mac to PC, has a higher degree of risk. The PC
does not understand Mac font suitcases, so you have to dig the individual
font files out of the suitcases to use them on the PC. Depending on the
font, who made it, and how old it is, the Unicode assignments may be wrong.
If they are, all hell breaks loose on the PC :-)

Be aware that much of the "stuff has moved around in my document" carnage
cross-platform is produced by the differing printing subsystems. On either
platform, Word does not make either the display or the print job: it simply
hands the file off to the operating system. All the measurements come from
the printer driver in use. There's nothing you can do about this.

If a document is correctly formatted, you will never be aware of the
differences: each document will format and paginate and print perfectly. If
the document contains blank lines and hard page breaks, allow plenty of
extra project schedule, because you will have to laboriously fix it each
time it changes platform.

Since I see that you are a Visio MVP, I need to warn you that the Mac
Microsoft Office can't cope with most of what Visio can do to it :-) I
suggest that you export to PNG. We can import WMF (badly...) but not EMF.
EPS is supposed to work, but usually *doesn't*. Nothing to do with
hyperlinks or properties will make it across :-) No SVG, no EMZ, and
definitely no Macros :-)

Hope this helps -- come back if you need more specifics.


On 29/7/06 1:17 PM, in article uTAu$1rsGHA.4252@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
"Graham Wideman [Visio MVP]" <noone@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Folks:

I'd appreciate any pointers, links to web pages etc that give advice on
setting up Word Styles to work reliably cross-platform. Ie: On both Mac and
Windows. Main concern that I know about is how to specify fonts in a way
that works reasonably well.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Graham




--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

.

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