Microsoft Word Index Entries Out of Order

Tom — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:29:04 +0000

Indexing with Word is pretty good. You go to places in text that you want in the index, enter the text you want to appear in the index, push a button and shazam, an index, all aphabetical and formatted and everything. In theory. But I’ve had a strange problem in Word 2000. I was creating an index and some entries were missing. I went looking and realized they were in the index, but completely out of place. This is what the faulty index looks like when it’s generated by Word. Note the out of order entries in bold.

Floutet, Aima, 294
Floutetta. Vr Monthouz, Aima (dite la Floutetta)
Maître, Louise (fl. d’Ami, 111, 164, 176, 515
Dentrue, Jeanne (fl. d’Emery, 357
Folliet, Pierre, 27

After tearing my hair out for a while I noticed a clue. See it? I finally noticed that the parentheses weren’t closed on the out of order items. When I looked, I realized that the markup in the actual text, that is the entry that is supposed to end up in the index in the first case was

Maître, Louise (fl. d’Ami; fm. de J.-Ja. Bonivard)

So at least in Word 2000, if you try to index text with a semicolon in it, it truncates everything from the semicolon on (the text in bold). That part just gets completely cut off and doesn’t show up in the generated index, but it isn’t entirely discarded. Note in particular what it’s done: it is now indexed alphabetically according to the truncated text that is now invisible. In other words, I tell it to index Maitre, Louise (fl. d’Ami; fm. de J.-Ja. Bonivard), which I expect to appear like that under Mai, but instead it appears as
Maitre, Louise (fl. d’Ami and gets filed under Fm. Very strange behavior. I suppose I could use it to set an alternate order to my index. I can think of hundreds of situations where I would want to do this. Oh wait a minute, maybe not.

I wonder if Microsoft has fixed this in the intervening eight years. Since there’s nothing in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, I’m guessing it’s still not fixed unless there was a total rewrite of indexing and it got fixed by accident, but I don’t think there’s been a total rewrite of Word for a long, long time.

If you arrive here because you had the same problem in a newer version of Word, please leave a comment. For that matter, if you’ve tested it in another version of Word and the problem doesn’t exist, please leave a comment to that effect. Just curious.

Take Control of Popups in Firefox

Tom — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:57:03 +0000

By default Firefox comes with a popup blocker enabled that prevents popups from automatically opening, that is the ones that you don’t specifically request, but that open just because you visit a page. So that’s fine. That problem is solved. What is more annoying is legitimate popups that are actually useful, but which are very unfriendly. Heres how to tame them in Firefox.
Okay, so lots of sites make good use of popups to improve your user experience, such as showing a large version of a product picture without making you navigate away from the page with product information. That’s nice of them. Unfortunately, quite often lazy or stupid developers inadvertently make these popups incredibly annoying as well. You end up with a window open that is not resizeable, has no navigation, and is missing all sorts of information. In the least objectionable case, this means an image that is slightly cropped. More commonly, it means a page that is incomprehensible because you can’t read what’s there, can’t see even the important part of the image all at once, or worst of all, that has necessary links which then take you away to pages intended to be viewed in the full browser, but now you’re stuck in that little window. That has always annoyed me beyond reason, but I’m sort of a curmudgeon.
Another incredibly annoying behavior is when developers resize the window. This is not really their fault, but if you are using advanced tab management in Firefox with the excellent Tab Mix Plus extension, you have tremendous control over where popups open. Sometimes I have them open in a new tab. If the develop expects her popup to be standalone, it makes sense to size it just large enough to fit an image of known size, for example. That’s a nice feature. It just has a nasty effect on my browser when opened in a new tab, rather than a new window.

So I went hunting for Firefox extensions that would save me from this aggravation and found that you can strike back at these miscreant web developers using built-in settings in Firefox. Hooray!

First, let’s just stop this nonsense of letting other people decide how big my main browser window should be. They can still set windows to open at a certain size, but resizing an existing window will not work with this simple tip. In Firefox, in the top menu bar, go to Tools » Options.. » Content and click on the first Advanced button, not the Advanced tab or the second Advanced button in that panel (talk about good UI design).

Now you’re in the Advanced Javascript Settings window. Just uncheck them all. I don’t see any reason to let a script on a web page do anything for me. If I really need to resize my window, for example, I’ll do it myself thank you very much.

Now we come to the case, though, where the developer has not created a resizable popup window, so I can’t resize it and, as often as not, can’t use that page at all. Nice design buddy. But, again, Firefox comes to the rescue. Up on the address bar (i.e. where you normally type http://raisedbyturtles.com, or would if you didn’t already get updates via the RSS feed or email), you enter the Firefox configuration screen by entering about:config and hitting the enter key (in other words, no http or anything like that, just about:config). This will bring up thousands of options. To pare down the list to what we want, down where it says “Filter” type in dom.disable_window_open_feature. Now you have a list of just the features you want. Double-click on any line to toggle that feature between true and false.

You can have your pick of which options you want to change and which you don’t. This is working pretty well for me:

You can see a full write-up on those features on the Firefox tips page, but these are the ones we care about:

dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable

Set this to true to make sure all pop-up windows are resizable.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimizable

Set this to true to make sure all pop-up windows are minimizable.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar

Set this to true to always display the menu in pop-up windows.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.location

Set this to true to always display the Navigation Toolbar in pop-up windows.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars

Set this to true to prevent sites from disabling scrollbars.

Enjoy better surfing without those annoyances!

Raised By Turtles» annoyances

Microsoft Word Index Entries Out of Order

Take Control of Popups in Firefox