Draftsmith: Review

My review of Draftsmith, the new product from Intelligent Editing (developers of PerfectIt), was published by IPEd today: https://www.iped-editors.org/february-2024/review-draftsmith-certainly-has-a-place-in-an-editors-toolbox/

Draftsmith integrates ChatGPT with Microsoft Word in a seamless way. Although its target market is writers in the draft stages, it certainly has a place in an editor’s toolbox.

IPEd: Institute of Professional Editors; the professional association for Australian and New Zealand editors.

Word: Highlight all equations

Someone on an editors’ Facebook group asked: ‘Is there a non-macro, non additional software way to select all equations on a manuscript in order to change their color?
I’ve tried to find, without success, if equations use an style that you can tamper with, or if the equation tab has such an option. It’s an engineering manuscript, and going one by one would take forever.’

In my quick test, I noticed that when I inserted an equation using the equation editor (Insert tab > Symbols group) Word used a different font for it, but not a specific style, and that font was Cambria Math. Armed with that knowledge, I’ve come up with a quick way to highlight all equations in a document that were inserted using the equation editor in Word. Because the default font is Cambria Math, I’ve used that as part of the find/replace—if your document uses a different font, substitute that font at Step 4.

Steps for Word for Windows (Mac should be similar):

1. Choose a highlight colour from the Font group on the Home tab. Try to choose one that’s not used elsewhere in the doc. You need to do this first otherwise the highlighting won’t work.
2. Press Ctrl + h to open the Find and Replace window.
3. Click More.
4. Put your cursor in the Find field, click Format (bottom left of the Find and Replace window), select Font, then select Cambria Math (or whatever specific font your document uses for equations). There should be NO characters in the Find field.
5. Put your cursor in the Replace field, click Format again and select Highlight. Again, there should be NO characters in the Replace field. Your Find and Replace window should look like the screenshot below.
6. Click Find Next then Replace to test it works OK. If you’re confident nothing else will change, click Replace All.

Hyphens, dashes, minus signs

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) summarises the differences between these punctuation marks: https://cmosshoptalk.com/2024/01/23/hyphens-and-dashes-a-refresher/

Note, this is from CMOS (a US style guide) and other style guides may differ about spacing around such characters. However, most will agree on en dashes for ranges and em dashes for parenthetical points. For example, the Australian Government Style Manual has this guidance for the various dash symbols: https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/grammar-punctuation-and-conventions/punctuation/dashes

Many of my clients use negative numbers in their documents, so I have a PerfectIt wildcard find/replace set up to find <space><hyphen><number> and change it to a minus sign, if that is appropriate for the circumstance.

[Links last checked February 2024]