Interdisciplinary aspects:
Text Technology
Linguistics an other disciplines
The Background to this Web Portfolio
Motivation of a Web Portfolio
As already mentioned at the beginning of this portfolio (cf. session 1) a web portfolio provides easier access to the information given in class and makes an interaction via internet possible.
It is also a means of becoming familiar with the use of everyday’s (electronic) media.
It is a form of “Applied Text Linguistics” that has been a subordinate topic within this “Introduction to Linguistics” class.
A web portfolio is a general source of (class) material and enables the students to exchange ideas and tasks more easily.
A web portfolio does not have to be uploaded onto a homepage, a blog (web log) like the one you are having access to now is also a very practical way of publishing information.
The creation of a portfolio web site
A learner’s portfolio should contain the main information, material and tasks discussed in class. It should illustrate the teaching goals and provide an easy access to the necessary information.
Web sites can be structured in various ways. In fact, their structure depends on the interest and the focus of the web site author/ creator.
Entries can thus be structured according to the author’s preferences. It has to be constructed with web editing software and has to be professionally formatted in order to look good, well structured and to be easy to use.
A web log (blog) is generally structured in inverse order, because the first entries will later emerge at the bottom of the page or in another folder that is called “Archive” or “Previous Posts”. But this inverse order will not cause to much of a problem.
How to run a website
There are several ways to make web site.
- You can run your own web server on a DSL line and save your HTML files
- You can use the university web site and upload you HTML files there
- You can use any other web service provider and upload your files there
- You can use a blogging software and create your own weblog, like the one you are facing now J
When you want to use a blog, there are many different providers that you can use. Some addresses would be:
www.blog.de or www.blogger.com
Revision: What is a website again and what is a hypertext?
A web site is a hypertext document with embedded document objects. These documents are linked to other text, image- or table objects within the web page/ blog and to external web sites.
A text on a web site/ web log is therefore a hypertext either with conventional hierarchical parts or as a complex network of parts.
A hypertext is any text document published on the World Wide Web. It is found in electronic dictionaries, on blogs (like this) and e- commerce sites. The search engine GOOGLE is one of the most widely connected web sites.
Revision: What is a text again?
A text comprehends a lot of properties, but its main properties consist of the keywords: appearance, meaning and structure!
APPLYING TEXT THEORY PROFESIONALLY
The Text “What a Linguist Needs to Know about Word Processing” is a very useful instruction written by Prof. Gibbon. It illustrates very well how to work professionally on word documents.
The entire text can be found on the following link:
http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/~gibbon/Docs/LinguistcsAndWordProcessing03.pdf:
___________________________________________________________________________
E-MELD Consultant's Report 2004
What a Linguist Needs to Know about Word Processing
or: Don't hack it - design it!
Dafydd Gibbon
Universität Bielefeld, 2004-10-01 (V03 - draft, comments welcome)
1. Objective
This report explains why and how to use stylesheets in word processing, from a linguistic
perspective. The present document is used as a model.
2. Motivation
Many users of word processors are unfamiliar with the advantages of using well-defined
styles for document objects like titles, headings, paragraphs of specific types, which have
the same consistently defined rendering properties (font, spacing, centring, indentation
etc.) wherever they occur in a document. A common practice is to assign rendering
properties of this kind to each local occurrence of a document object separately: a stretch
of text is marked, and instantly formatted. For short documents this is a handy, "quick and
dirty" procedure. For long and complex documents it leads to waste of time, patience and
energy (and of course the personal satisfaction of having produced a professionally
formatted document is missed!).
The advantages of using styles are:
1. Time saving: if the rendering properties have to be changed for each individual
occurrence of a document object such as a heading, this is unnecessary time-wasting -
change a style once to change all occurrences of this style at the same time.
2. Consistency preserving: if the rendering properties are changed separately by hand,
inevitably errors occur, leading to inconsistency of formatting.
3. Consistent cross-media conversion: well-defined styles in one formatting system, such
as a word-processor, can be converted consistently into well-defined styles in another,
such as the world-wide web.
4. Consistent cross system conversion: with well-defined styles, there is a much greater
chance of comparable results when different word processors or different versions of a
word processor are used.
5. Support of barrier free access: screen readers for the visually impaired can process
styles intelligently and produce well-structured output.
Some examples:
• wherever headings of the same level occur, they are expected to look the same, so why
not assign the format once and for all;
• wherever text paragraphs occur, they are expected to look the same as the others of
the same type;
• wherever bibliographical entry paragraphs occur, they are expected to look the same as
the others of the same type, and so on;
• wherever indentations occur, they should be of the same size;
• wherever spaces before and after paragraphs occur, they should be consistent, and
also freely variable.
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In each of these cases, why not assign these properties once and for all, rather than
separately, each of the many times that they occur in a document? If well-defined styles
are not used, none of these advantages can be used.
3. A linguistic perspective on document production
Ordinary word processing - as used in linguistic articles and reports (including this one) -
from the applied linguistic perspective of text generation, not from the naive vantage point
of writing with a computer. The idea is that linguists should not march from phonemes
through morphemes and words to sentences and stop there, but should regard texts as
systematic language objects which are worthy of their systematic attention, and apply this
knowledge professionally in their own writing. These language objects are made of
document objects with semantic properties and media properties, just like other language
objects with semantic properties and media properties (e.g. phonetic interpretations), can
be described with a document grammar, and receive text-structural descriptions, for
example as tree-diagrams. Essentially, then, the report is about practical aspects of styles
and stylesheets from the applied linguistic point of view.
The moral of the story is that if linguists (particularly linguists concerned with language
documentation, corpus tagging, XML markup and the like) do not use these objects and
their properties intelligently in generating their own texts with a word processor ... well,
maybe the moral should not be made too explicit, after all. This document, by the way, was
composed using these techniques with OpenOffice (version 1.1.), and will be distributed
both in the OpenOffice writer format (sxw; compressed XML) and in OpenOffice-generated
PDF format, following the open source, open archive philosophy (see also
http://www.openoffice.org).
4. Applications of linguistics in word processing
Evidently, words are within the purview of linguistics, and it is not surprising that linguistics
is heavily involved in the development of word processors like OpenOffice or MS-Word. A
moment's reflection will show that the following properties of words, dealt with by modern
word processors, are actually the domain of linguists, which is why linguists are employed
by software companies to solve issues concerning such properties:
• Spelling (cf. spell checkers).
• Correct inflection (cf. grammar checkers).
• Thesaurus as a writer's help.
• Word completion facility.
• Capitalisation facility.
• Use of correct quotation marks.
• Translation of terms for localisation to other languages.
There are also many add-ons to word processors concerned with functionalities such as
the reading aloud of selected text portions, translation of selected text portions, which
involve the results of many years of research in linguistics, phonetics, speech technology
and text technology. There are, of course, imperfections in each of these applications:
nobody is perfect, no theory is complete, and neither are paper dictionaries and
grammars.
5. Beyond word processing: documents and document objects
The term "word processing" is something of a misnomer. No user of a word processor
presumably just wants to write words. The goal is usually to write a document, consisting
of sections, consisting of different paragraph types such as headings, and text, each
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paragraph consisting of lines, and each line composed of a stream of characters. Note that
this account has nothing to say about linguistic units such as words and sentences. In fact,
this is the level of Applied Text Linguistics, in which texts are dealt with in much the same
way as sentences are dealt with in more conventional linguistics.
The objects dealt with in Applied Text Linguistics are, among others, those just introduced.
For convenience of reference they will be called DocumentObjects. There are many kinds
of Document Object, but the main Document Objects handled by word processors are:
1. document,
2. page
3. paragraph,
4. character,
5. list (enumerating list or bullet list),
6. table.
The basic Document Objects are document, page, paragraph and character; the other two
types are more specialised.
6. Document objects and their properties
Objects of all kinds have specific collections of properties, and Document Objects are no
exception. The properties which Document Objects have are of two main types:
1. structural properties, which define the components of the Document Object and the
contexts into which it fits (e.g. for paragraph objects: what the next paragraph object
should be),
2. interpretative properties, which define what meaning, i.e. content a Document Object
has (this is entirely up to the author and the readers, of course) and what rendering
style a Document Object has (i.e. what its appearance will be).
The relation between document structure on the one hand, and its two interpretations as
content and rendering on the other, are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Text linguistic view of Document structure,
Content and Rendering.
The properties are typically organised as attributes, i.e. collections of mutually exclusive
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properties, which are referred to as the values of the attributes. For example, a paragraph
Document Object cannot be both centred and left-aligned at the same time, and a
character Document Object cannot be both 12pt and 10pt, or italic and plain at the same
time. Some Document Object definitions are shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Document Objects and some of their properties
Document Objects Attribute Typical values
Document Name relevant metadata
Author relevant metadata
Version relevant metadata
Page Size sub-attributes: size, top, bottom, left, right
margins, header, footer, frame, ...
Margin sub-attributes: top, bottom, left, right margin
Header special page-linked paragraph type
Footer special page-linked paragraph type
Paragraph Alignment left, right, centred, justified
Numbering enumerated, bulleted
Tabulator horizontal tab settings
Indentation left & right margin, first line indentation
Spacing gap above and below
Line 1, 1.5, 2, ...
Frame sub-attributes: line type, thickness, colour, ...
Character Font Arial, Helvetica, Times Roman, Courier, ...
Size 10pt, 12pt, ...
Bold bold, non-bold
Italic italit, non-italic
Underline underline, non-underline
Colour red, orange, ... white, black
Note that the four Document Objects in Table 1 are not in a fixed hierarchy, but in a partial
order: pages do not necessarily correspond to paragraphs, and paragraphs do not
necessarily correspond to pages. Pages and paragraphs belong to two orthogonal -
independent - levels of organisation. Documents consist of paragraphs, and paragraphs
consist of characters. But simultaneously, documents consist of pages, and pages consist
of columns (one, two or more). The difference can easily be characterised:
1. The paragraph is a part of document structure, which organises and structures the
meanings intended by the author. The paragraph also has rendering properties, which
reflect the intentions of the author with respect to the paragraph's status as title,
heading, subheading, etc., and of course content properties.
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2. The page has no significance with respect to the intentions of the author (in general;
bibliophile books are the exception which proves the rule), but reflects production
contraints determined by the publisher.
7. Styles
The definitions of rendering properties for Document Objects are known as styles, and a
set of such styles for a document is known as a stylesheet. Stylesheets are generally
provided by publishers for books, scientific articles, and so on, and traditionally are printed
on paper, with examples. However, in electronically based publishing the stylesheets are
simply the definitions of Document Objects in a word processor. Using the formatting
facility of the word processor, a set of styles can be defined and assigned to an entire
document stylesheet. For OpenOffice, this is can be stored as a template file with the
conventional ".stw" ending (rather than ".sxw"), and in MS-Word as a template file with the
".dot" ending (rather than ".doc").
8. Special paragraph object types
The concept of paragraph object used in word processors is very general, and many
different subtypes of paragraph object can be defined. The subtypes inherit the basic
rendering properties defined for the standard paragraph type; these properties may be
overridden by the specific properties needed for the paragraph subtype. The paragraph
subtypes used in the present document are:
1. Pre-Title (user-defined)
2. Title (predefined but modified),
3. Subtitle (predefined but modified),
4. Author (user-defined),
5. Version (user-defined),
6. Heading 1 (i.e. level 1, not the first heading; predefined but modified),
7. Text body (predefined but modified),
8. Footnote (predefined but modified).
Clearly, in all but plain typewriter rendering style such as those used in the body of plain
emails, no distinction in terms of rendering properties occurs. However, in the context of a
word processor, rendering differences can easily be defined. Some paragraph subtypes
are predefined by the word processor, as indicated in the list. Many other paragraph
subtypes are typically required in a long and complex document and can be defined by the
author. Very useful examples of predefined styles are the paragraphs in a table of
contents, which point to page numbers of sections, bibliographical references, or the
paragraphs in a bibliography which contain the individual bibliographical entries.
Note that if the correct heading levels are used, a table of contents can be constructed
automatically, and satisfactory renderings in other media, e.g. the web, can be achieved.
The styles are assigned to segments of text by means of markup codes; the most familiar
rkup code system is HTML, the markup language used for web documents.
9. Are you a word processor hacker?
If you do any of the following, as a linguist you should be ashamed of yourself...
1. To create a space between paragraphs you insert an empty line (actually an empty
paragraph object consisting of one line). DON'T DO THIS: define the space before and
after the paragraph type which suits your needs. WHY? Preceding and trailing spaces
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are properties of paragraphs and should be defined in the style for the relevant
paragraph type. If you just use an empty paragraph (i.e. type the return key) you are
committed to a fixed spacing; if you define the spacing for each paragraph separately,
you run the risk of inconsistencies and waste time; if you define a style, you will avoid
these problems.
2. To create a table you use spaces and tab separators, and draw the table using separate
graphical lines over the text. DON'T DO THIS: create a table object, and assign frame
properties to it. WHY? Spaces and tab separators may be defined differently on
different machines even with the same word processor, and the table will consequently
look a mess. A table rendered in this way is extremely hard to edit, and will not export
consistently into another medium. A table object, with properly defined styles for cells,
rows, columns and framing is quick to construct, easy to edit, and exports consistently.
3. To create a list, you write numbers at the left of a new paragraph. DON'T DO THIS: use
a list object, either with enumeration (pick the numbering style) or with bullets (pick the
bullet style). Why? If the list style does not suit you (e.g. the wrong kind of indentation is
used), you can edit the style once for all and stop worrying. If the bullet points do not
suit you, replace them in the style with other symbols, and the same applies.
4. To create a heading, you mark the line (actually the paragraph) and directly assign
centring, font size, etc. to the marked section. DON'T DO THIS: define the rendering
style properties for the Document Object. WHY? This is a common, but really not so
clever practice, which is a real time-waster and inconsistency-causer: imagine that an
editor requires the headings to be changed to a different font, font size, or highlight
convention, and imagine how long this would take for an article or a book if each
heading were changed separately. Not only that, imagine the potential for errors and
inconsistencies. If you change the style, you change it once, and all headings of the
same type change automatically.
5. To change the numbering of a heading or subheading, you add the number by hand to
each heading individually. DON'T DO THIS: add a numbering property to the heading
style once, and all headings will change automatically. This ensures automatic
numbering which is both consistently counted and consistently formatted.
10. Document structure
The structure of a given document can be described using a tree-graph derived from a
document grammar, just like the structure of a sentence. The structure of the present
document, for example, is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Document structure for the present document (simplified).
6/11
For example, a document may consist of front matter, a main text, and back matter. The
front matter will include title, author, version (e.g. date, edition, table of contents, etc.), and
in the case of a book an be very complex. The main text may consist of chapters, sections,
subsections, subsubsections and so on, which in turn consist of Text Objects such as
paragraphs, lists (in turn consisting of list elements), tables and so on. The back matter
may consist of endnotes, bibliography and index. A linguist will not find it hard to write a
grammar of this kind on the lines of the grammars used for the description of sentences of
a language. Further details will be given below.
11. How to ...
The following instructions pertain to OpenOffice but can be transferred easily to the
corresonding menu functions in commercial word processors. Only the basic features of
style definition are dealt with.
1. Designing the text structure and the rendering:
1. Draw up a list of the paragraph Document Object types (such as Title, Heading 1,
Heading 2, etc.) which you need (see the list given above for the present document).
2. Construct a table with 3 columns (for Document Objects, attributes and values).
3. Enter each of these paragraph Document Objects in the leftmost column (cf. the
table given above).
4. Enter the attributes required for each object, and modify the default paragraph level
values which these attributes should receive (e.g. spaces, justification, numbering,
line centring).
5. Also enter the attributes which all character objects in this paragraph type should
receive by default, and modify the default values accordingly (e.g. font, size, italic,
colour).
6. This table is your stylesheet.
2. Implementing the rendering:
1. Open a new text document.
2. In one of the text fields in the function bar, the style field should appear. In a new
document, this style entry is likely to be called "Standard", "Normal", etc. Click on the
select button attached to this field, and very likely you will only see this style listed.
3. Navigate the menu space via the "Format" menu point, then "Styles", then
"Catalogue".
4. A long list of pre-defined styles will appear.
5. In the lower left text field select "All Styles" instead of "Automatic", and even more
styles will appear.
6. Check this list for styles in your list; stick to the names for standard predefined styles
where possible.
7. Click on any style name, and a dialogue box with around 12 tabs at the top
willappear. Each tab groups related attributes together.
8. The default values of the attributes can then be modified according to your
stylesheet.
9. If no suitable style is defined in your list, define a "New" style: the dialogue box with
the 12 or so tabs will appear, first of all requesting a name for the file, the name of
another style to switch to when the "Return/Enter" key is pressed, and a basic style
from which the new style inherits its defult properties.
10.The default values of the attributes can then be modified according to your
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stylesheet.
11.Note that no explicit distinction is made in this dialogue box between tabs for
paragraph, line and charater properties. The distinction is rather obvious, but it will be
useful to list the tabs pertaining to each type of Document Object.
12.Commercial word processors use similar techniques for style definition; the
appearance of the menu points and dialogue boxes is very different, of course.
3. Test your style definitions by writing a short document containing
1. the styles you have modified or defined, such as
1. Title
2. Heading 1 (i.e. top level heading)
3. Heading 2 (i.e. next level subheading)
4. Text body
2. and additional Document Objects such as lists and tables, with their styles defined
appropriately.
3. Check the styles used in this report.
When you have done this, you will have
1. designed a text document on linguistic principles, and in particular
2. defined a stylesheet in the form of an object-attribute-value table containing a set of
styles relevant to your document.
3. implemented the stylesheet using a word processor,
4. tested the implementation in the production of a document.
12. A practical example: the present document
Figure 2 shows a reproduction of the first page of an earlier version of the present
document as a sequence of document objects, along with a stylised version of the
Document Objects and the names of the rendering styles assigned to them.
Figure 2: Document objects on p. 1 of an earlier version of the present document.
The page object itself is not labelled; it has upper, lower, left and right margin attributes, as
well as a footer attribute. The stylised version of the document object shows the bounding
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boxes which show the rendered size of the document objects, determined by:
1. the size of the objects it contains (e.g. for a paragraph object, the number of lines it
contains and their spacing),
2. its own size rendering attributes (e.g. for a paragraph object, its left, right, upper and
lower margins).
The rendering attributes assigned to each style obtain their values by inheriting them from
a default style, in this case called "Standard", unless they are specifically modified to suit
the special requirements of the document object concerned. For instance, the "Title" object
contains paragraphs with modified upper and lower spacing, which contain characters with
modified values for size (16pt) and highlighting (bold) attributes. See Table 2.
Table 2: Main rendering attributes and values of objects in the present document
Style Inherited from Paragraph attributes Character attributes
Standard: default Left indentation: 0.00cm
Right indentation: 0.00cm
First line indentation: 0.00cm
Upper spacing: 0.00cm
Lower spacing: 0.00cm
Left justified
Arial standard 12pt
Pre-title: Standard Upper spacing: 0.40cm
Lower spacing: 0.40cm
Centred
Italic
Title: Standard Upper spacing: 0.40cm
Lower spacing: 0.40cm
Centred
Bold 14pt
Subtitle: Standard Upper spacing: 0.40cm
Lower spacing: 0.40cm
Centred
Italic
Author: Standard Upper spacing: 0.20cm
Lower spacing: 0.20cm
Centred
Version: Standard Centred
Heading1: Standard Outline numbered
Upper spacing: 0.40cm
Lower spacing: 0.20cm
TextBody: Standard Upper spacing: 0.07cm
Lower spacing: 0.07cm
Numbered list: Standard Numbering
Unnumbered list: Standard Bulleted
Footer: Standard Centred 10pt
Field macros: Footer
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13. A simple grammar for the present document
The following phrase-structure grammar describes the arrangement of document objects
on the first page of the current documents. In order to complete the grammar for the whole
document, table and figure objects need to be added.
DOCUMENT → FRONT-MATTER DOCUMENT-BODY
FRONT-MATTER → Pre-Title Title Subtitle Author Version
TEXT-BODY → SECTION SECTION*
SECTION → Heading1 TEXT
TEXT → TextBody | NumberedList | UnnumberedList
There is a clear analogy to standard phrase structure /constituent structure, context-free)
grammars for sentence syntax of the "S → NP VP" type. In the notation used here, the
arrow "→" can be read as "consists of", the space between the categories on the righthand
side of the arrow as "followed by", the asterisk "*" as "none or arbitrarily many", and
the vertical bar "|" can be read as "or" (here the exclusive or).
The notation used in different document description contexts varies in detail, but all
notations employ some means of indicating hierarchical or immediate dominance
structures meaning "consists of", alternatives, and sequence or linear precedence.
14. Summary
The main point to be made is that a document has a text linguistic tructure which is
comparable with sentence structure in conventional linguistics, and that these receive a
rendering interpretation which is comparable with phonetic interpretation in conventional
linguistics. These structural levels have much in common:
• In semiotic terms, both documents and sentences are complex signs, which can be
thought of as abstract or mental units, which are interpreted in terms of reality at two
levels, i.e. as meaning and form,
• paradigmatically, the constituent objects and their properties are organised into an
inheritance hierarchy, the most common kind in conventional linguistics being a type
hierarchy, the most common kind in word processor text linguistics being a default
hierarchy,
• syntagmatically, the constituent objects are organised into a compositional hierarchy,
rather like the constituents of a word or a sentence,
• The same formalisms can be used for describing the structure, the meaning and the
form properties of constituent objects, for example context-free grammars, or as
attribute-value structures and inheritance hierarchies.
The constraints on text structure are of course different in detail from constraints on
sentence structure, just as constraints on sentence structure are different from constraints
on word structure. For the syntagmastic hierarchy, typically document grammars are
defined in order to permit electronic analysis and display of documents; in the XML
document markup framework, grammars are expressed as Document Type Descriptions
(DTSs) or XML Schemata.
Topics of this kind are dealt with in the discipline of Text Technology and a number of
related disciplines, including Computational Linguistics and Eoftware Engineering. The
most widespread kind of approach goes under the heading of XML technologies, which
comprise conventions for document grammars and tools for creating, checking and
presenting documents systematically, and are gradually being adopted as a standard for
the creation and rendering of internet documents. Of particular interest for the humanities
is the use of these techniques to classify, archive and search documents systematically,
10/11
and in this area text technology is closely related to library and archive sciences. The Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI) is perhaps the most well-known approach to document
description using these technologies. These technologies are not bibliographically
documented here because the standard references can be found on the internet by
straightforward keyword searching, and in any case are often internet documents
themselves.
It should be emphasised that there are many more dimensions to document production
than those described here. The focus of attention in the present document was on the
classic written paper. Many more rendering techniques are available, of course, including
rendering as a hypertext (in graphical or text browsers), rendering by reading aloud with a
speech synthesis application for blind users or users in visually adverse environments.
15. Conclusion
The moral of this story is that you, as a linguist should, design documents in a linguistically
motivated fashion, practising what you preach, and bearing in mind how document
structure relates to both your content and to the appropriate rendering style for each
Document Object and its content. By doing this you will
• save time,
• be consistent,
• ensure the same appearance in different word processors and on different platforms,
• support barrier-free document access in assistive technologies for the disabled.
For short, informal documents of temporary relevance, a quick and dirty solution with no
well-defined Document Objects, and using local format assignment of paragraph and
character properties may be fine. For long or complex documents, advantage should be
taken of style definitions.
And of course you do not have to be a linguist to understandthese points or produce
professional stylesheet-based documents.
11/11
___________________________________________________________________________
The reading of this text can be highly recommended, because a linguist needs to know about:
- text construction
- spelling (spell checkers)
- correct inflection (grammar checkers)
- how to use a thesaurus as writer’s help
- word prediction/ completion (also mobile phones)
- capitalisation
- use of correct quotation marks
- translation of terms for location to other languages
In this context, knowledge on Word Processing is very important, because Word processing with OpenOffice or MS-Word is an area of APPLIED LINGUISTICS.
Most people do not know how to format texts professionally, they only concentrate on the appearance of the text an forget about possible problems in converting and layout changes.
TEXT OBJECTS AND DOCUMENT OBJECTS
Formulation is all about text structure:
-----------------------DOCUMENT
-------↓ --------------↓
FRONT MATTER TEXT BODY
↓ -------↓ --------↓ -----↓ -----↓-------- ↓ ------↓
Title Subtitle Author Version Section Section Section
↓ ---------↓ ----↓ ------↓ ----↓ ------↓
heading text heading text heading text
Word processor text object hierarchy:
- Character:
- Properties: font, size, highlights
- Paragraph:
- Properties: upper, lower, left, right margins
- Types:
- Default
- Text body
- Headings (different levels of sub-headings)
- Lists: numbered lists (ordered lists), unordered lists (bullet lists)
- Tables
- Figure
Text objects and their properties:
CHARACTER
Font Arial, Helvetics, Times Roman, Courier, etc.
Size 10pt, 12pt, etc
Bold bold versus non-bold
Italic italic versus non-italic
Underline underline versus non-underline
Colour red, orange... black, white
PARAGRAPH
Alignment left, right, centred, justified
Numbering enumerated, bulleted
Tabulator horizontal tab settings
Indentation left and/ or right margin, first line indentation
Spacing gap above and below
Line 1, 1.5, 2,....
Frame sub-attributed: line type, thickness, colour,...
LISTS
Properties of lists:
- line spacing
- indenting
- spacing between list marker and text
Types: - ordered lists (numbered lists); properties: leading number
Example:
1. Apples
2. Oranges
3. Pears
4. Quinces
- unordered lists (bullet lists); properties: leading dot/ dash/ arrow/...
Examples:
- Apples
- Oranges
- Pears
- Quinces
TABLES
| Word | POS | Phonology | Morphology | Definition | Text Corpus
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
● Parts:
- Header rows (Properties: spacing, font, etc.)
- Contend rows (Properties: spacing, font, etc.)
- Columns (Properties: spacing, font, etc.)
- Cells (properties: padding, fonts, etc.)
● Properties: borders, etc.
FIGURES
● Parts:
- Picture
- Caption
- Cross-reference
● Advantages:
- Numbering is automatic
- Moving the picture changes the numbering
PARAGRAPHIC STYLES
Paragraphs: the professional method!
The UNPROFESSIONAL method is to “hack” paragraph objects!
For example: Their properties can simply be defined by using the “bold”, “centred” etc. properties. Only one paragraph is changed/ modified at a time then.
But this is definitely:
- a waste of time and energy, because all changes have to be made separately to each paragraph
- leads to inconsistency
- creates problems with converting into other media (e.g. hypertext for the internet)
Now: The professional method:
Types of paragraph objects should be defined as types, by means of styles (The German Formatvorlage).
This technique leads to:
- time-saving, because changes apply instantly to the whole document!
- Versatile
- Permits consistent formatting
- Permits easy conversion into other media
TYPICAL PARAGRAPH STYLES
- Default- Standard (predefined- the granddad of all styles)
- Pre-Title (user- defined)
- Title (predefined but modified)
- Subtitle (predefined but modified)
- Author (user- defined)
- Version (user-defined)
- Heading 1 (i.e. level 1, not the first heading; predefined but modified)
- Heading 2 (i.e. subheading of level 2, not the second heading; predefined but modified)
- Text body (predefined but modified)
STYLE FAMILIES: PROPERTY INHERITANCE
● Similar styles may “inherit” properties from more basic or general “parent” styles, which
they are “linked” to
● Default- do not use this- its the grandfather of all styles!
- Title
- Heading
- Heading 1
- Heading 2, etc.
- Text body
- Text body indented
- LongQuotation
- Bibliography
DOCUMENT OBJECTS: Superimposed Document Objects
● Document
- Filename
- Etc.
● Page
- Orientation: portrait, landscape
- Margins: top, bottom, left, right
● Running titles:
- Headers
- Footers
● Fields for insertion into running titles, etc.
- Page numbers
- Total number of pages
- Date
DOCUMENT OBJECTS AND THEIR PROPERTIES
Document Name relevant metadata
Author relevant metadata
Version relevant metadata
Page Size sub-attributes: size, top, bottom, left, right margins,
- header, footer, frame, etc.
Margin sub-attributes: size, top, bottom, left, right margins,
Header special page-linked paragraph type
Footer special page- linked paragraph type
