Sunday morning, for a change

Personal notes

Hand washing some dishes last night, I gashed the back of my hand when a thin glass imploded. After I put my hand in it, of course. I looked at the cut and told Husband “Get your keys. We going to the Emergency room. That’s gotta get stitched up.”

2 hours later, I was cleaned up with a stitch to close the inch-long and fairly deep gash. The emergency room people were very nice and fast.

This morning, it’s limiting my never very great typing abilities and it hurts. Ow. And I have no ability to tolerate pain, so I’m not delighted.

But it gives me an out on a bunch of household tasks, which is good! It’s going to cut into my crochet time, tho, which is bad. I’m working on a jacket in a wool/silk yarn that’s working up like butter. It’s going to be beautiful when it’s done.

Totally different topic: My grandson is walking! http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y24/Talesia/Videos/?action=view&current=MVI_7949.flv Such a cute baby. It kills me they live 1200 miles away. He’s 1 on 20 Aug. Happy Birthday, Devlin! May you have 100 more.

More stuff

I’ve been talking to a fellow about SEQ fields in Word and I thought this might be a useful post on my blog.

SEQ fields

SEQ fields overcame a bug in older versions of Word. The bug showed up about Word 6. The bug was in autonumbering; essentially, autonumbering didn’t work. Word would ignore or randomly change your number settings with other settings. This was bad for tech authors, as we use a lot of autonumbering.
 
The SEQ field method tells Word that a paragraph has a specific number in a sequence. It hard coded the number – as far as Word is concerned (it was like a window into the guts of RTF, which was the mark up language of those versions of Word). So when you have:
{SEQ} words here 
{SEQ} words here 
{SEQ} words here 
{SEQ} words here 
 
The SEQ field tells Word that what’s really there is (in the RTF code):
1 words here 
2 words here 
3 words here 
4 words here 
 
It also told Word to not touch the numbering, to just accept what’s there and move on. Which was great and what you wanted from Word 6 to Word 2000 because the autonumbering was broken in all those versions.

It kept many tech authors from saying too many bad words. It didn’t keep us from using Word and drinking too much, but it did reduce how much we said the bad words.

SEQ fields and newer versions of Word

SEQ fields still work in newer versions of Word but are mostly unneeded because autonumbering generally works now.

However, if you are using SEQ fields and you save the Word file as XML, Word hard codes the numbers in the XML. This may not be what you wanted.

My recommendation is to stop using SEQ fields in Word 2003 and later, especially if you are going to convert the file to XML at some point, unless the hard coded numbers are OK with you, which they may be. It’s not really needed anymore, anyway.

But I’ve got forty billion legacy files!

I suspect you could write a macro to replace the SEQ fields with Word autonumbering. But I’m not a macro writer, so I leave this to smarter brains than mine. If someone wants to come up with it, I’ll post it, tho.

Ow, cut it out – it hurts!

Ok, husband is up and my hand hurts. Enough typing for a while.