FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  189 (02/12/99)

THE GOOD BOOKLET

As a clergyman coping with the growth of material available for church services I find that I am producing more and more occasional service booklets. Everything from Sunday morning services to weddings, funerals, baptisms, blessing of pets you name it, if we can have a service for it then we need a service sheet. Coupled with this is the decline in religious knowledge. By that I mean that as people attend church services less frequently we can no longer take for granted that those coming will know such things as The Lords Prayer or responses to prayers that we might have assumed 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Consequently I find that the best way of making worship accessible is by producing a service booklet which contains everything that is needed; words, prayers, hymns, readings, the lot. Obviously with the excellent PC's and scanners we have now this is fairly easily done. However I am finding that what was a short time ago a two-page booklet is some times now three and four pages long. This raises the tricky task of getting all the text in the right order before printing so the pages when folded it make into a presentable booklet. Do you or any of your readers know of a piece of software that can automate this process? I am using Word 97 so perhaps there might be a macro that would do the job?

Revd. Jeremy Thompson

A

Booklet printing is not one of Word's strong points. It can be done, using linked textboxes, where pages are laid out in landscape format and divided into separate sections. They can then be folded and stapled into a booklet and text will flow in a logical sequence on numbered pages, but it's all a bit of a fudge. There's a helpful article on the Microsoft Support web site at: http://support.microsoft.com/

support/kb/articles/Q120/7/78.asp

Quite honestly you would be better off using a word processor like Lotus Word Pro 97, which has a booklet printing template. Word Pro is part of Lotus SmartSuite 97 and has been featured on a number of computer magazine cover discs recently.

TIME AND TYPE

I'm looking for a typeface that includes Roman Numerals, as I need them to prepare several clock faces.
M.F. Levett

A

There may well be specialist software and typefaces for making clock faces however a standard Windows True-Type font like Times New Roman can produce authentic looking Roman numerals in almost any size using the characters I, V and X.  Most word processors will allow you to adjust character size and spacing and some like Word have drawing facilities for positioning and rotating text objects. A good graphics program, like Paintshop Pro makes it even easier to design a clock face from scratch. A decent quality inkjet or laser printer can produce a finished face on thin card. (Clock restorers use dilute wood stain to give new faces an aged look). It also occurs to us that horological reference books contain hundreds of clock face designs; images can be scanned into a graphics program and re-touched if necessary, before re-sizing and printing. If anyone has any other useful tips or knows the whereabouts of any clock face design software please let us know and we'll gladly pass it on.

DAGGERS DRAWN!

Philip Pearson (F!F!F! November 18) will find his dagger and double dagger symbols in Word by clicking Insert then Symbol. It is possible that he may not immediately recognise them in the Symbol chart because, until they are actually selected they not look very much like the daggers which we normally see in text and footnotes etc. In my software (Word for Windows) they are located in Row 4 Columns 20 and 21. Even after insertion, they often look weak in small font sizes. However, converting to bold face, makes them clearly stand out as Dagger and Double Dagger symbols.
David Schenck

Single and double dagger symbols are available in most common fonts - Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, etc. - Alt+0134 (†) and Alt+0135 (‡).
Alan Bowman

The dagger and double dagger symbols are available in a font that comes with Lotus Word Pro called "Lotus WP Type".

Keith Primrose

A

We knew they were in there somewhere…

HUNT THE ICON

Where do I get icons from? Windows 3.11 had a selection of pictures to choose from but my version of Windows 95 appears to have none.

Peter Mawer, Bridgerule, Holsworthy, Devon

Windows 95 (and 98) has a hidden stash of icons in a file called pifmgr.dll, which resides in the System folder in the Windows directory. To access it right-click on a desktop shortcut, select Properties then the Shortcut tab and the Change Icon button. Use the Browse button to navigate to the pifmgr.dll file and see if there is something you fancy. Incidentally you can easily create your own icons in the Windows Paint program by renaming any bitmap image file (*.bmp) with the extension *.ico. There are also tens of thousands of icons and 'themes' on hundreds of Internet web sites covering just about any subject you care to name. Just type your particular interest, followed by the word 'icon' or 'theme' into the Find field of any search engine and be prepared to waste an hour or two sifting through the choices!

FONTS OF WISDOM

This might help Michael Cromey-Hawke (F!F!F! November 18) who was looking for a way to view the fonts on his PC. I've discovered a brilliant program
called FontLister at www.theill.com/fl/ It seems like it would be much more versatile (and more fun) than the Microsoft macro you suggested. It can display all your fonts whether they are installed on the PCs hard disc or on a CD-ROM. You can even insert your own text to see what the effect is with different fonts and at the size you want to use. You can then print out selected font examples.

The program can also be used to install fonts from a CD or delete fonts just
by clicking on an icon. Each font can be displayed in an ANSI table together with the keyboard shortcuts for the various letters and the means of enlarging individual characters for easier viewing. FontLister is shareware but only costs $5 (or more, if you like!). I reckon it's worth far more.
Russell Harvey

I have found a very useful program called akFontViewer 3.1. This is a font viewer for Windows that displays all the fonts, along with a sample, a full character map -- to see all the possible characters in a font – plus the ability to see fonts in any style (bold, italic, etc) and size, and print them out. The program is very compact and quick to download from: http://attend.to/anatoly
M.K.

Download a program from the Microsoft Office update site (www.microsoft.com) called 'Wordware'. This puts a number of tweaks on your Word toolbar, one of which creates a Word page giving examples of all the Fonts available on your computer. It's quick and easier to use than the macro you mentioned.

Clive Davies

A

Thanks for those very useful suggestions