A.C. Flory's Blog, page 66

Adding captions to pictures in Word 16

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At their most basic, captions are simply labels that describe the content of an image. As such, you can simply type a label beneath each image and leave it at that, or you can opt to not have captions at all. But if you are going to have captions, I’d strongly recommend using the ‘Insert Caption’ command found on the References tab.

If you use the ‘Insert Caption’ command, Word will automatically label and number each caption for you. Once all the captions have been entered, you have the option of getting Word to generate a Table of Figures like the example shown below:

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When images are moved or deleted, Word not only updates the page numbering, it also updates the caption numbering.

How to use the ‘Insert Caption’ command

To begin, select the first image that requires a caption.

Next, check that the text wrapping of the image is not ‘In Line with Text’. If it is, change it to another option. [See Wrap Text options].

The next step is to open the References tab on the Ribbon and click the option to Insert Caption:

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Word will now display the Caption popup:

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Click inside the Caption box [after ‘Figure 1’], press the spacebar and type the description of the image.

Click OK to complete the caption. Word will automatically create a text box for the caption and insert it into the document, directly below the image to which it belongs.

How to change the label of the caption

If you do not want to use ‘Figure’ as the label for your caption, click the small down arrow next to the Label box:

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The drop down list displays the three, pre-set labels: Equation, Figure and Table.

Note: you can also add your own labels to this list.

Click a Caption label to select it.

How to create a new Label for Captions

You can create your own label by clicking the button for New Label option on the Caption popup:

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Type the new label into the ‘New Label’ popup and click OK. In the example shown above, the new label is ‘Photos’.

You can now select the new label from the ‘Labels’ list.

How to change the position of the caption

Captions can be placed above or below the image. With the Caption popup open, click the small arrow opposite ‘Position’:

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Select either ‘Above selected item’ or ‘Below selected item’ from the list.

How to change the number format of a caption

With the Caption popup open, click Numbering… :

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The Caption Numbering popup will open.

Click the small down arrow next to ‘Format:’ to display the list of available number formats.

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Click the number format of your choice and click OK.

Type the caption and click OK to save and exit the Caption popup.

How to move the caption

Click the caption to select it. When the text box frame appears around the caption, hover the mouse over the frame until the mouse changes to a black, four-headed arrow as shown below:

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[image error]

Click-hold-and-drag the text box to a new location.

How to group the caption with its image

Until now,  the image and its caption have acted as two, separate objects, but it is possible to ‘lock’ them to each other via the ‘Group’ function. Grouping creates an outer ‘envelope’ around the two objects so they can be moved as one.

To group an image and its caption, first check that the text wrapping of the image is not ‘In Line with Text’.

Note: Grouping is only possible if the text wrapping of the image is not set to ‘In Line with Text’. 

The first step is to click the caption. A text box will appear around it.

Next, hold down the Shift key on the keyboard while you click the image.

Now, both the image and the caption will have ‘handles’ around them, but they are not yet grouped:

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Next, right click either the image or the caption.

Note: right clicking causes a context sensitive menu to be displayed.

You should now see a menu with ‘Group’ as one of the options:

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Click Group to display the Group sub-menu.

Now click Group on the sub-menu. The image and its caption will now remain locked to each other until you ungroup them.

How to ungroup two objects

To ungroup an image from its caption, right click the grouped object. Click Group on the context sensitive menu and Ungroup on the sub-menu.

How to move a grouped object

To move a grouped object, click on the image to display the outer frame and handles.

Note: if you click in the caption area, you will select the caption text box as well as the outer frame.

Next, point the mouse at the top of the outer frame until it changes to a black, four-headed arrow [as shown]:

[image error]

Click-hold-and-drag the group to the required position.

The type of movement available to the grouped object will depend upon the text wrapping chosen for the image before it was grouped. For example, if ‘Square’ was chosen as the original text wrapping, the text will flow around the grouped object in a ‘box’ shape.

You can change the text wrapping of a grouped object in exactly the same way as for a single image [see How to work with images in Word 16, Part 1].

How to delete a grouped object

To delete the whole grouped object – i.e. the image and its caption – click the outer frame of the object to select it. Then press the Delete key on the keyboard.

In the next post, I’ll explain how to use these captions to create a Table of Figures.

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Private Health Insurance in Australia – who needs it?

Disclaimer: I have just cancelled my private health insurance after almost 40 years. I will try to be unbiased as I present the facts that led to this momentous decision, but some bias is inevitable.

For Australians under 40, and international readers who know nothing about our hybrid health care system, I’ll start with a very brief overview:

The scheme [universal health care] was created in 1975 by the Whitlam Government under the brand Medibank, and was limited by the Fraser Government in 1976 to paying customers only. The Hawke Government reinstated universal health care in 1984 under the brand of Medicare. Medibank continued to exist as a government-owned private health insurance provider until it was privatised by the Abbott Government in 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(Australia)

Note: The government owned Medibank provided private health insurance in direct competition with private health insurers.

In 1999, the conservative LNP government led by John Howard brought in the Private Health Insurance Rebate Scheme. Depending on your age and income, the government will rebate 30% of the cost of your health insurance premiums. This rebate is subtracted from your health insurance premiums so you only pay for the remainder. This is the ‘carrot’ part of the equation. If you don’t take up health insurance by the time you hit the age of 30, you will pay 2% more whenever you finally do take up health insurance. This is the ‘stick’.

The purpose of the Private Health Insurance Rebate Scheme was ostensibly to relieve the pressure on public hospitals which are run by the states using funding from the Federal government.

When the rebate scheme was first introduced, premiums were relatively low and the private cover was a true ‘safety net’. In the 20 years since then, premiums have crept higher and higher while the payout for procedures and treatments has shrunk. This is true for both for-profit and not-for-profit health insurers.

As someone with a pre-existing medical condition, I’ve had basic hospital cover for almost 40 years. For most of those years, my premiums ensured that I could be treated in a private hospital by the specialist of my choice without long waiting periods or astronomical out-of-pocket expenses.

That all changed today when I finally realised that my basic hospital cover only did one thing – it allowed me to have my own specialist:

in a public hospital
in a shared ward
after I’d gone through the standard waiting period for public hospital treatment.

The following shows exactly what my private health insurance covers:

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Apologies for the poor quality of the graphic but I wanted you to be able to see the whole thing. Every item with an ‘R’ next to it has ‘restricted’ cover only. This means that my private health insurance would only pay a miniscule amount [above and beyond what Medicare already pays]. Dialysis for chronic kidney failure, insulin pumps and weight loss surgery are not covered at all.

I don’t have kidney failure or diabetes or weight problems, but I can see at least five things I may need as I age. Sadly, with my basic private health insurance cover, I’d end up having to pay for them out of my own pocket anyway.

For me, the crunch came when I realised that I was already a [free] public hospital patient, but I was paying for the privilege.

Clearly, the hospital cover I had was next to useless, but when I looked at the levels of cover that would give me a proper safety net, I discovered that a) even some of the top plans didn’t cover me for everything and b) even if they did, I couldn’t afford them.

The sad truth is that I can barely manage to pay the $71.50 per month for the basic hospital cover I have/had. $71.50 doesn’t sound like much – it’s under $20 a week – but when you live on the age pension, $20 makes a difference. Wasting it on private health insurance that covers me for nothing is crazy.

So today I stopped being crazy and joined the ranks of Australians giving private health insurance a big miss. These Australians include young people on government support, older Australians on government support, and a growing segment of our population surviving in the GIG economy. In short, all those people who can’t afford the kind of health insurance that actually provides value for money.

So who’s left then?

I’m not sure. The table below is from the government website:

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The income categories are shown across the top and indicate that under 65 years of age, all rebates cut out above $140,001 for singles and $280,001 for families. Taking bracket creep into account, that’s not a huge income by 2020 standards.

This may be my bias showing, but I am feeling rather ripped off. I’ve been a good girl and paid my premiums for years, but it seems as if the only ones benefiting from the 30% health insurance rebate are the health insurance companies themselves.

As the health insurance rebate is being paid from our taxes, I can’t help wondering whether we wouldn’t be better off if the rebate were abolished, freeing up all that money for the public health system.

Meeks

Smorgasbord Blog Magazine Guest Writer – Background to a publishing journey. A reflection – Twenty years looks back by Frank Prem

Update! So sorry! I assumed there’d be a link… Here it is

I’m not much into poetry, but I like what I like, and right from the start, I’ve been moved by Frank Prem’s poetic way of telling a story. In ‘Small Town Kid’ I felt as if Frank was somehow tapping into my own childhood as a ‘New Australian’. In Devil in the Wind, it was my own memories of Black Saturday that came back to haunt me. Memories of waiting and fear and horror as the full scope of the devastation became apparent…

That’s Frank Prem’s great power – he weaves simple words and images into a visceral reminder of our own stories. Yet he’s an unassuming man with all the quiet strength of a true Aussie.

If you want to become a poet, or a writer, or an artist, but don’t think you can, read Frank’s story and take heart. It is possible.

Miira and Jaimie

I am working on another how-to post, really, but all work and no play isn’t healthy so…. tah dah

ebooks – for memoirs, cookbooks, picture books, etc

I haven’t written any how-to’s on how to create an ebook because I assumed there were countless how-to’s out there already. I was both right and wrong; there are lots of people providing helpful information about text-based ebooks such as novels, but there are not that many devoted to graphics heavy ebooks.

This distinction was brought home to me when one of my blogging friends needed help with a picture book. He was trying to create an ebook with both pictures and carefully formatted text.

It can be done, but the digital technology we have at the moment is limited when it comes to integrating text and graphics.

Before I start on possible solutions, and/or workarounds, I want to explain what those limitations are, and why they cause problems with graphics heavy ebooks.

Things ordinary ebooks can do

Ordinary ebooks are great with text but just barely okay with pictures. That’s because they’re not really ‘books’ at all. They’re more like rolls of toilet paper with words projected onto them.  The story literally unrolls in an ebook.

This has significant advantages. For starters, as ereaders don’t care about the size or number of words shown on their screens, the reader can make those words as big, or small, as they please…for the whole ‘book’. I use this feature all the time because my eyesight ain’t what it used to be.

Things ordinary ebooks can’t do

Unfortunately, the very flexibility of ebooks can create problems when it comes to adding pictures to the text. Pictures don’t ‘flow’ the way text does, so getting them to fit the screen requires that they be sized for the screen.

But which screen? There are dozens of different digital devices from smartphones to dedicated ereaders to tablets of various sizes. Making an image to fit one screen almost guarantees that it won’t quite fit another.

Another problem with pictures is that not all digital devices are in colour. Dedicated ereaders, such as ordinary Kindles and Paperwhites, only do grayscale.

To display a picture in colour, the digital device has to be some kind of tablet [like the Kindle Fire] or a mobile phone. So again, which device should you optimise for?

And finally, because of their ability to ‘flow’ the text, ebooks don’t do precise formatting. Unfortunately, graphics heavy books like memoirs, cookbooks, picture books etc, look best when the formatting is controlled and the pictures are in colour.

To work around this fundamental problem with ebook design, Amazon created a number of specialist programs:

Kindle Kid’s Book CreatorKindle Comic CreatorKindle Create

I took a quick peek at Kindle Kids, and I couldn’t quite work out what it was doing [the manual approach]. I suspect it’s a lot easier if you use the PDF option and simply pour everything into the app in one go.

Kindle Create

Of the three, Kindle Create is the one I find most useful. In its current iteration, it is actually two programs in one:

The first allows you to ‘format’ Word .doc and .docx files into text-based ebooks like novels. There is help for creating a Table of Contents as well as Front and Back matter pages, and you can add pictures although the image manipulation is basic to say the least.The second is the old Textbook Creator app. which turns a PDF document into an ebook.



Kindle Create for text based ebooks

This version of Kindle Create allows you to include all the standard elements of a book as well as pictures, but all you can do with pictures is adjust the size, and sometimes the location. That’s it. You can make the image small, medium, large, or full, but you can only adjust the placement of small or medium images. Large and full images seem to be placed automatically and can’t be changed.

One nice thing is that Kindle Create automatically wraps the text around the image as shown below:

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But again, only if the image is small or medium.

This does not constitute ‘total control’ over the way text and images display, but it’s not bad. More importantly, when I did a preview of the page, it seemed to display quite well on tablet, phone and Kindle devices.

Something I was not expecting was that the colour image was automatically changed to grayscale on a Kindle device:

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Given that this option works with standard .doc or .docx documents, I was pleasantly surprised by how it put everything ‘together’.

The old Textbook Creator

For the sake of clarity, I’m going to call the second option of Kindle Create by its old name – Textbook Creator.

Textbook Creator doesn’t try to integrate text and pictures at all. It creates an ebook out of a sequence of pictures.

If you’re nodding your head and saying, “Ah, she’s talking about PDFs”, you’d be right.

To quote from one of my own how-to’s:

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. With PDF documents, each page is like a ‘snapshot’ of the original Word page. That’s why it’s called WSIWYG – what-you-see-is-what-you-get.

Basically, everything on the Word page becomes a composite ‘picture’ that cannot change. This is how you make sure that what appears on the screen of the digital device is exactly the same as what you originally created, including the positioning of both graphics and text.

It’s the difference between ‘some control’ and ‘total control’.

“But…PDFs can’t be edited.”

That would normally be true, if you were dealing with a PDF document as a whole. But Textbook Creator cuts the original PDF document into its component pages, and each one those pages can be swapped out, individually.

To make this a bit clearer, let’s say you have imported a 20 page PDF document into Textbook Creator. Then you discover that you made a small error on page 15.

Rather than redoing the whole, 20 page document, you can:

go back to the original, make a change to page 15,export page 15 as a new PDF documentswap the new page 15 for the old page 15 inside Textbook Creator, and voila!

Okay, I admit the process is convoluted, but it does make working with PDFs a little less frustrating.

So what is the downside of using Textbook Creator?

The text in the ebook created by Textbook Creator cannot be resized. You can pinch-and-zoom to see details at a larger size, but you cannot specify that the text in the entire ebook be at a certain size.

This means that the original document has to be designed in such a way that it will suit most readers and most ereaders.

In paperbacks, this is kind of standard, and expected, but not so in digital devices. Plus getting the document to fit can be rather tricky.

Getting the size right

As mentioned before, there are a lot of different ereaders out there, and screen sizes are not the same either. Designing a document to fit all of them is a case of picking something ‘average’ and basing the sizing on that.

But what do I mean by ‘sizing’?

The easiest way to explain is to show you. The following is a preview of this post, in Textbook creator:

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Can you see how tiny the text below the image is?

All I did was export a standard Word file to PDF and then import that PDF into Textbook Creator. The font size of the Word document is 12.

Now have a look at this preview. Same document but with a font size of 28:

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To get the document to display like that, I had to radically change how the Word document was setup. Basicallly, I simulated the Kindle Fire screen in Word so that I could place text and images to their best advantage.

The following screenshots show my page setup in Word 16.

1. Paper size

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The dimensions circled in orange create a page size that exactly fits the screen of my Kindle Fire 6.

2. Margins

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Again, those margins are designed to make reading the Kindle Fire 6 screen visually ‘comfortable’ without wasting too much space.

3. Layout

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Note: there are no settings selected in Layout. You need clean, minimal formatting in the original Word document. This includes not using things we normally take for granted, such as manual ‘spacing’.

For best results, you should always create styles – for the effects you must have – and use only those styles in the formatting.

Why?

Because Word is an old program, and Microsoft never throws anything away, it simply buries it under new code. This means that there is a lot of…[expletive deleted]…junk in Word that lurks in the background and can seriously mess with other programs that attempt to read/use Word documents. So keeping the document ‘clean’ is important.

But wait…there’s more. Remember how I said I’d changed the font size to 28? The next screenshot is of the Normal Style I created just for Kindle Fire 6 documents:

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I can’t tell you why translating text from Word to a small digital device shrinks the text. All I know is that it does, and we have to manually compensate for it.

The other thing you might want to notice is that the alignment is set to ‘Justified’. Not only does it make the text look more professional, it also saves space on the screen.

To change the Normal Style on your own version of Word, right click on the style [on the Ribbon] and select ‘Modify’ from the drop down list of options [see here for step-by-step details]. That will get you to the Modify Style dialog box shown above.

Once the Modify dialog box is open, change the font size and alignment and then click ‘Save’.

We should now have a document that is optimised for an ebook.

Once the Word document is as perfect as we can make it, save the document as a Word file, and then Export it as a PDF.

Your book is now ready to import into Textbook Creator.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the Textbook Creator software.

cheers
Meeks

Table of Contents update 24/2/2020

I’ve added three more posts to the Table of Contents of the How-to posts:

how to create free barcodesworking with images in Word 16 [Part 1] – image compression, resolution and Wrap Text settingsworking with images in Word 16 [Part 2] – moving, resizing and cropping an image, plus placing a border around an image

I’ll be adding posts for more advanced Word topics in the coming weeks.

cheers

Meeks

Editing images in Word 16 [Part 2]

Click here to display the Table of Contents

Although it’s always preferable to edit images using dedicated graphics software, it’s often necessary to do minor edits once the images have been inserted into a Word document. This is especially true after the A4 Word document has been converted into the required paperback size [trim size].

In this post, we’ll look at basic image editing tasks you may have to perform in Word 16.

Selecting an image

To select an image in Word 16, simply click it.

You should now see a frame and circular ‘handles’ around the outer edge of the image:

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All of the handles will resize the image, but only the corner handles will keep it in proportion.

Change the size of an image

To decrease the size of the image, hover the mouse over one of the corner handles until the mouse pointer changes to a diagonal arrow.

Click-hold-and-drag the handle into the middle of the image.

To increase the size of the image, drag the corner handle away from the image.

Cropping an image in Word

Cropping allows you to cut away the unwanted parts of an image. This technique is particularly useful if you want to create a ‘close up’ of one particular detail, or when the details are too small to see clearly, but the image itself is already at the maximum size for your page.

To illustrate this point, have a look at the two screenshots below:

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In the first screenshot, you can barely see the ‘Crop’ option. You certainly can’t see any details about it. In the second screenshot, only part of the Ribbon is visible, but the ‘Crop’ option is shown in ‘close-up’ and is easy to read.

How to crop an image

First, click the image to select it.

This will cause the image frame to be displayed. It will also make the ‘Picture Tools’ tab available on the Ribbon.

If the tab is not open, click Format as shown below:

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You should now see the ‘Crop’ option on the far right of the tab:

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To crop the selected image, click the Crop icon [not the word or arrow] on the Ribbon.

The image will now display the distinctive black, crop handles:

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Point the mouse at one of the crop handles until it changes shape and looks like a smaller version of the crop handle:

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Click-hold-and-drag the handle towards the middle of the image.

When you release the mouse button, the grey area visible in the background represents the area of the image that will be cropped:

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To complete the crop process, click the Crop icon on the Ribbon again.

Once the image has been cropped, click it again and use the corner ‘handle’ to make the image bigger. This basically creates your ‘close-up’.

Moving an image in Word

Depending on how you originally inserted your image into Word, changing the page setup of your document may mean that you also have to re-align the image on the page.

The first step is to click the image to select it.

Next, point the mouse at the image. When the mouse changes to a four-headed arrow, click-hold-and-drag the image to a new location:

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If the image won’t move, it means that the default ‘Wrap Text’ setting – i.e. In-line with Text – is still in force. This setting locks the image to the text at its current location.

To ‘unlock’ the image, open ‘Format’ on the Picture Tools tab:

[image error]

Next, click Wrap Text to display the menu of text wrapping options. In the example shown, ‘In Line with Text’ is the active wrap text setting. You can find detailed pictures and descriptions of the wrap text settings here.

To select one of the other Wrap Text options, click the icon next to it. Depending on which option you chose, you should now be able to move the image on the page.

Placing a border around an image

Borders are not necessary, but if the image contains a lot of white space, a border can give the image more definition.

To place a border around an image, click the image to select it, then click Picture Border on the Ribbon as shown below:

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A small, drop down menu of Picture Border options is displayed. These include Border colour, line thickness and line style:

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Colour – click one of the colours on the palette to select that colour for the border.

No Outline – click to remove the border around the image.

More Outline Colors – Click to display extra colour palettes from which to choose the line colour of the Border.

Weight – click to display a menu of line thicknesses. Click one to select a different thickness for the Border.

Dashes – click to display a menu of line styles – e.g. dots and dashes etc. Click one to select a different line style for the Border.

In the next post we’ll look at creating captions for images.

Click here to display the Table of Contents

Vokhtah – a review

Some days are just so good, you have to stand up and dance. Today is one of those days:

‘Yes, this book is different and weird and unlike anything else I’ve ever read. But that’s the point!If intelligent life exists on other planets, it’s going to be bizarre and foreign and at least semi-incomprehensible to human intellects. Reading this book really did feel like being transported to an alien world, and that was fantastic. I wish I’d read it sooner, because it really is a master-class in world-building. Vokhtah is a haunting, vividly-constructed depiction of a fascinating world—one I’d happily revisit.’

That quote comes from a wonderful review of Vokhtah that I stumbled across this morning. I know Vokhtah will never become a best seller, but so long as readers ‘get it’ every now and then, I’ll be happy.

You can read the entire review on Berthold Gambrel’s blog:

https://ruinedchapel.com/2020/02/21/book-review-vokhtah-the-suns-of-vokhtah-book-1-by-a-c-flory/#comment-15977

Have a wonderful weekend, my friends.

-hugs-

Meeks

A different kind of storytelling

I’ve always loved animation but never thought I’d be good enough to tell an animated story. Seems I was wrong.

Duplicate Effort by Kristine Kathryn Rusch – a review

I just finished Duplicate Effort and left this review on Amazon. Can’t provide the link yet, but here’s a copy of what I wrote:

Not since C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series have I come across a saga with such great sci-fi, great storylines and great characters.

Why do I call the Retrieval Artist series a saga? Because each volume has it’s own, standalone story, but also adds to the character arc of some really interesting, no, fascinating characters. Characters like Miles Flint, Noelle DeRicci and even Ki Bowles. Bowles is not a ‘likable’ character, but she’s still 3 dimensional and human; someone we might not like but who deserves some compassion nonetheless.

And, of course, there’s Talia. 13, orphaned, traumatised, and a clone. Not a ‘real’ child. What happens to a living, breathing person who’s classified as a ‘thing’? Talia will change Miles Flint’s life. She will also make you think about what it really means to be human.

You can read Duplicate Effort as a standalone story. I guarantee you will enjoy it. But if you love deep, well thought out sci-fi and characters with a life of their own, I would very strongly recommend reading books 1 to 7 of this series in sequence. You won’t regret it.

If you’ve never read Rusch’s work before, this series is a good place to start.

Rusch began as a traditionally published author and became a very successful Indie. Some of her business knowledge and experience is distilled into a series of blog posts she calls Business Musings. She talks about everything from contracts and agents to IP [intellectual property] and copyright for Indie authors. A great resource.

cheers

Meeks