By Esther Criscuola de Laix

Congratulations, you’ve got your A-R contract in hand! This means your work of top-notch musical scholarship will soon join generations of others in our acclaimed Recent Researches in Music series. This also means that, among other things, you are probably busily working away at one or more portions of your text apparatus according to our guidelines for Manuscript and Disk Preparation: table of contents, acknowledgments, introduction, critical report, and, if applicable, tables, captions, and a “Texts and Translations” section. To do this, you are probably using Microsoft Word or some kind of similar word processor: OpenOffice, StarOffice, LibreOffice, Scrivener, etc., etc. (Forty lashes with a pica stick to anyone who is still using WordPerfect, and maybe twenty to those using Google Docs for a project like this.)

Here, then, are a few simple tips for using that word processor to prepare a clean, readable text apparatus that will be a joy to work with for both editor and typesetter. (These particular examples are based on and geared toward Microsoft Word, but the general principles are going to be pretty much the same on any platform.)

1. Keep formatting simple. 

Brutally simple, even. Always start with a plain, blank document rather than any of the fancy templates your program may offer. And within that plain, blank document, don’t use anything in your word processor’s “Style” menu besides the default “Normal” style for main text and the default “Endnote Text” or “Footnote Text” styles for endnotes or footnotes (more on those below). Use the boldface and italic settings from the font formatting menu when needed to distinguish text in headings, work titles, foreign words, words used as words, and other such things. If inserting URLs in citations, don’t let the word processor automatically convert them to pretty blue, underlined hyperlinks, as they will often want to do—usually a quick Undo (Ctrl+Z or Cmd-Z) right after the link converts will do the trick. (You can turn off automatic hyperlinking of URLs in your word processor’s AutoCorrect and AutoFormat options.)

2. Paste smart. 

Copying or moving text into your document from an external source? Say, a quote from an online source or a book citation from an online library catalog? Don’t just hit “Paste” (Ctrl+V or Cmd-V)! If you do, you’ll probably pull in the source’s formatting and styles, which will not only disrupt the ideal of simplicity outlined above in item 1 but also could create formatting mishaps down the line. (We have a few cases in our volumes where text printed as gray rather than black and was not noticed till the book was finished—and many of these cases are bibliographic citations that the author probably grabbed from an online catalog.) Instead, make sure you are doing a “Paste and Match [or Merge] Formatting” (if you want to maintain italics and other font-level formatting) or even just a “Paste as Plain Text” (if italics and other font-level formatting aren’t an issue). That will ensure your pasted text will blend in perfectly. (In the words of Mr. Humphries of Are You Being Served?: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, you cannot see the join at all.”)

Even better: in most word processors’ options, you can set default paste options for pasting within a document, between documents, or from other programs. For the last of these, especially, I recommend making the default “Paste and Match Formatting.”

Paste options in Home ribbon

Paste options in Home ribbon. 
(All illustrations from Microsoft Word as part of a Microsoft Office 365 subscription in Windows 10.)

Paste options in right-click pop-up menu

Paste options in right-click pop-up menu.

3. Just say no to tabs. 

Your editor and typesetter will really and truly thank you for this one. If you have any text that needs to be presented in any sort of tabular or columnar form—this can be your text(s) and translation(s) showing the foreign-language text next to its English translation, or a table with some sort of data about the music of your edition—then please, in the name of all that is holy, don’t use tabs as separators, because all it takes is one tiny edit or one minuscule layout tweak to turn your flawless columnar presentation into a gosh-awful mess. Instead, use your word processor’s table feature to insert a table of the appropriate number of rows, columns, etc.

Table options in Insert ribbon

Table options in Insert ribbon.

For tables of contents, though, don’t even worry about this—just list the main sections of your document in regular, “normal” text form. We’ll apply the hierarchical formatting and, at the proofs stage, the page numbers.

4. Trust the footnote function. 

Don’t add your endnotes and/or footnotes manually, and please don’t put them in a separate document from your main text (we have received manuscripts like this before, and dealing with them is a headache). Just use the word processor’s footnote or endnote function. It will number the notes automatically, update the numbering automatically when you add or subtract notes, make space automatically for new ones, and just generally save both you and us a world of trouble.

Footnote and endnote options in Reference ribbon

Footnote and endnote options in References ribbon.

5. Find and Replace is your friend. 

The Find and Replace function in Word and similar programs can be a real asset when proofing your text for consistency and continuity. (Something you shouldn’t forget to do before sending A-R anything!) A quick Find (Ctrl+F or Cmd-F) is helpful for checking over occurrences of a name or term, especially if search results are listed in their own sidebar. Some other useful Find and Replace tricks:

  • Think some occurrences may be spelled slightly differently from others? Just search for part of the word (e.g., “Gardan” to catch both “Gardano” and “Gardane”).
  • Think some occurrences might be capitalized and some not? Use the “Match Case” option to search for both cap and no-cap versions and compare how many there are of each, then do a Replace to fix those that need it.
  • Need to change some (or all) occurrences to italic? Type the word in question into the “Find What” field and add “Format”—“Font”—“Italic” to the “Replace With” field while leaving it blank.

Find function with Navigation sidebar

Find function with Navigation sidebar.

Also of immense help: the “Whole Words Only” option (so that searching for “breve” doesn’t also pull up every single occurrence of “semibreve”), the search direction option (which can also be used to search only footnotes or endnotes), and, of course, the wonderful world of wildcards. (Look them up in Microsoft Word Help; they rock.)

For more useful word processing guidelines and tips, check out our Manuscript and Disk Preparation Guidelines, especially under “Textual Materials,” item 4 (“Other Word-Processing Details”). Got any of your own to share? Let us hear about them below!


Esther Criscuola de Laix is a house editor with A-R Editions.