Re: Margins in Word

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- FS -dot- COM -dot- AU>]

> I want to create a 2 inch left margin in Word and use the "blank" space for
> small grahical elements such as icons and menu bars. Can I do this in Word or
> do I have to use layout software.

Ron -

hi. Yes, I use a wide left margin to place caution messages and icons to
make them stand out. I also start some headings in the margin for the same
reason.

If you give me your fax number I can fax you a couple of pages showing
the different techniques we used to get things into the margin.

Briefly: for small icons, we make the image a bullet character and have a
negative indent, so that the graphic appears in the margin and the text
lines up nicely with the normal paragraphs. For larger items such as
caution messages, we use a text box in a frame and anchor it to the para-
graph we want it to stay with. This way, if you insert text elsewhere on
the page, the caution doesn't get out of line.

One warning: Word doesn't always seem to position frames correctly. I
have to do a final pass in page layout view to make sure that all the
graphics are where they should be. Sometimes I have to adjust the
positioning by hand. I believe this is a bug in Word 6. Either way, it's
very poxy and annoying.

For short documents and fairly simple graphics layout Word is OK. We're
just changing over to FrameMaker because Word has some 'features' that
make it very frustrating for producing larger ( > 50 pages) manuals.

Regards
---
Stuart Burnfield (slb -at- fs -dot- com -dot- au)        Voice: +61 9 328 8288
Functional Software                     Fax:   +61 9 328 8616
PO Box 192
Leederville, Western Australia, 6903