Formatting | TechFleur

Archive for Formatting

Mystery of the Disappearing Watermark

Originally, watermarks were faintly visible images or impressions manufactured into paper that identified its maker and/or quality. Today we use digital watermarks to provide an indelible message or identifier on electronic documents. Watermarks are useful because they are subtle and integrate with the contents of the document page. If you simply type the word “Confidential” in a page header or footer, the word can be digitally removed. However, if you apply a watermark of the word “Confidential” as the background on document pages, removing this classification becomes virtually impossible.

You can add a watermark to the pages of an Excel worksheet by inserting a picture field in the center section of the page Header. Sometimes, however, the watermark does not display in Print Preview or when the document is printed. You confirm that the picture field (&[Picture]) is in the page Header, so why doesn’t the watermark appear on the page?
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Contemplating Templates

January 17, 2012 / C. Blaise Mitsutama / Comments Off

Have you ever seen a child about to put something in his mouth? His mother rushes to stop him and says, “Don’t put that in your mouth. You don’t know where it’s been.”

I feel the same way about using old documents as the starting point for new projects. It’s tempting to use a document with existing text, formatting, images, and other components to reduce the work required to create a document from scratch. But no matter how clean a document looks, it can contain hidden problems that add time and cost to a project. Similar problems can occur when multiple authors work on the same file because each author may have different, possibly incompatible, ways of achieving a desired look-and-feel.

You can, and should, still use templates for efficient document production, and here are some suggestions to help you decide what works best.
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Print-to-PDF Doesn’t Work. What?!

January 15, 2012 / C. Blaise Mitsutama / Comments Off

Adobe® Acrobat®’s printer driver is frequently used to print files to PDF format. Usually, this is a reliable, quick, and easy way to create PDF files. Every so often, however, the resulting PDF just isn’t right. Text may wrap incorrectly around an image in Microsoft Word or may overlap a neighboring cell in Microsoft Excel, as shown in the figure below.

There is a relatively simple solution.
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Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet . . . .

January 12, 2012 / C. Blaise Mitsutama / Comments Off

When creating templates or dummy samples of print or electronic documents, you may find that using text from previous documents raises distracting issues. Copied text may contain confidential information or information that may be misinterpreted as being relevant to the current document.

For hundreds of years, printers have used the nonsense text, “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet . . . ” to solve the problem of what to print when meaning is less important than form. This filler text is based on Latin but is not intended to be read.

However, it’s frequently difficult to find a sufficient amount of nonsense text to fill all of the blank space in a template or sample document, and it’s harder to create nonsense text than you might imagine. You also need to be careful when you copy this model text from other sources because over the years, people have added hidden jokes or strings of letters that can detract from the focus of your work.

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