Subject: Re: Multi-Paragraph Headers and footers?
From: Randy Kramer (rhkramer@fast.net)
Date: Thu Mar 08 2001 - 09:45:50 CST
I may have "mastered" some aspects of Word, but I wouldn't say I
mastered headers and footers. These are some notes about behavior of
headers and footers in Word97. There may be other possibilities that
I've never used.
Paul Rohr wrote:
> 1. Growing "inwards" and squeezing the body content to make it smaller. We
> already have contraint logic which decides how much of a page should be used
> for the body container(s) based on the page margins. The idea would be to
> allow even less room if the headers / footers need more.
>
The above is the way I believe Word97 works. On the Page Setup |
Margins dialog you can specify margins from the Top, Bottom, Right,
Left, and Gutter for the basic page. You can also specify margins from
the top edge for the top of the header and the bottom edge for the
bottom of the footer.
Then the header starts at that specified top margin and grows down, and
the footer starts at the specified bottom margin and grows up.
Footnotes, if they exist, are handled above the footer, as part of the
page text rather than as part of the footer.
AFAIK, headers and footers have precedence over ordinary text -- that is
if the header and page are both specified to start 0.5" from the top of
the page, the complete header will be printed followed by the text. If
the top margin for the page is bigger than the sum of the header size
plus the header margin, the text will start printing as specified by the
top margin for the page, in other words, there may be whitespace between
the end of the header and the beginning of the page text.
Some other points about headers and footers:
1. Word lets you specify different headers for the first page and
subsequent pages, and, whether you do that or not, you can also specify
different headers for odd and even numbered pages (often useful, along
with the gutter margin, if you are going to print double sided).
2. (This is an enhancement beyond Word97.) I often used Word's revision
marks feature (Tools | Track Changes | Highlight Changes, etc.). It is
configurable, but I commonly left it at what I think was the default --
deletions shown "struck through", additions shown underlined. What I
never found in Word was a convenient way to disable this feature for
headers and footers but leave the feature enabled for body text. It
isn't real helpful to see that page numbers, dates, or revision numbers
changed in the header and footer of each page, in fact sometimes it made
the header or footer expand vertically, if, for example, the date
changed -- the header might need to show December 13, 2000 crossed out
followed by January 14, 2001 underlined in the space normally allocated
for one date. The real benefit of the feature is seeing the changes
within the text. Eventually providing a way to turn off revision marks
within headers and footers while leaving it on within the text would be
nice.
> 2. Growing "inwards" towards the body and getting clipped (or drawn
> underneath). This is a special case of #1, no?
I don't recall ever seeing this happen. The tough cases might be where
a graphic requires more space than is available inside the headers -- if
that happens I usually shrink the graphic -- I'm not sure what happens
if I'd print it without shrinking the graphic -- I'll have to see if I
can find a graphic to test.
>
> 3. Growing "outwards" from the body container towards the edge of the page.
> If there's not enough room, content gets clipped by the physical edge of
> the page, although we'd probably need explicit clipping code to avoid
> display or printing bugs.
I don't think Word97 can support this.
> It's been a long day, so I won't run though all the cases now. (This kinda
> feels like a good point for a power user like Randy to pop in and tell us
> how it should work.)
Thanks, but maybe it should be "sometime" power user.
>
> >Actually we should put some handles on
> >the left ruler so the user can interactively change margins like the top
> >ruler.
> >
I am pretty sure this can be done in Word, but I can't find the right
view / dialog this morning. (Maybe I'm remembering Excel?)
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