Q: What are special characters?

A: Special characters are characters which cannot be typed with a single keystroke. Generally, a modifier or “helper” key such as the ALT key must be used when typing special characters. An example of a special character is the letter “ñ” in the Spanish word “señor.” The wavy accent mark over the “ñ” is called a tilde.

Q: Do I need special software to insert special characters in my publication?

A: No, special software is not required. There is an easy way to insert special characters.

Q: How do I insert special characters in my publication?

A: Verify that the NUM LOCK light on the keyboard is on. If the NUM LOCK light is off, tap the NUM LOCK key once.

Look up the special character in the chart below. Hold down the ALT key AND on the numeric keypad (to the right of the main keyboard) type the four-digit code next to the character you want. Don’t release the ALT key until you have typed the complete four-digit code. For example, to type an “ñ” hold down the ALT key and type 0241 on the numeric keypad.

Note: when you insert a cross, the font which you are using will determine the exact appearance of the cross. Some fonts may make the cross appear more like a dagger. Highlight the cross and change the font if you’re not satisfied with its appearance.

Click here to download a copy of the chart which you can print. (Note: Adobe® Acrobat® Reader® is required.  Please visit www.adobe.com to download the latest version of Adobe® Acrobat® Reader® if necessary).

Other special characters can be inserted by using the Windows Character Map accessory or by clicking on the Insert menu in Microsoft Publisher or Word and selecting Symbol… Please consult the manual for your specific program for detailed instructions.

For more information about inserting special characters not included in the chart above, do a Google search using the keywords “special characters.”

You can find the logo for Seek and Find on LPi’s Art & Media Portal. Do a Quick Search for Seek and Find. The logo is available in full color or in one color (also known as black and white).

Please let the members of your organization know that they can find your publications online using Seek and Find. Consider running an article in your bulletin and/or newsletter so people will know about this service. Use the logo so that everyone will know they are in the right place.

If you have not yet had a chance to find your organization’s homepage on Seek and Find, please go and take a look. As a representative of your organization, you can “Take Ownership” of your page and control the content that is visible to viewers. I encourage you check out this great new service from LPi.

Check it out at www.SeekAndFind.com!

* * * * * * * * * * *

Kansas City, Des Moines, St Louis, Little Rock, Cedar Rapids, Phoenix/Chandler, Tucson, Twin Cities and St Cloud

Everyone from your organization is welcome to attend.

Click on the link below for dates and topics:

http://www.4lpi.com/new/index.php/church-leaders/b3-seminars/free-seminars

I’d like to share three tips with you for creating a picture perfect publication.

Tip #1:

When resizing a picture, always grab one of the corner handles and drag diagonally with your mouse. By doing so, you will preserve the original ratio between width and height. (Note: some programs require that you hold down the SHIFT key while you drag. Always release the mouse button before you release the SHIFT key.)

Tip #2:

When positioning a picture to the left or right of a block of text, flip the picture, if necessary, so that it directs the reader’s eye into the text. Watch out, however. If you flip a picture which incorporates words, numbers or a clock, for example, it will be obvious to your readers.

Tip #3:

When centering a picture above a block of text, avoid the temptation to stretch the picture so that it fills the column horizontally. Leave a little white space to the left and right sides of the picture. You’ll be surprised by how much more appealing to the eye it looks.

Please consult the manual for your specific program for detailed instructions.

Contributors.

Ah how we love their help, and dread their missed deadlines.

Managing your contributors is a personal challenge–part science, part art, mostly enthusiasm and effort.  Mangaging their text, on the other hand, is a fairly straightforward process, even though you may recieve multiple formats and styles.

Many contributors will provide you with articles created in MS Word, or jotted down in emails of various types–webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), or standard email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.).

While the contributors material is welcome, their formatting is not.  If you have chosen specific fonts, styles and formats, its particularly frustrating to waste time and effort re-formatting through the previous programs efforts.  Re-typing long stretches of text while still meeting deadlines is often impossible, but it can take as much time to fix formatting that the previous document placed on the text.  There has to be a simpler way around the issue.

The solution?  You have a few choices–the first and most important:

Establish firm contributor guidelines.

Contributors to your bulletin, newsletter, flyer, or report would like to help create the best document possible–if you establish which fonts, point sizes, and styles you will use and inform them, they’ll do their best to provide what you need.

If you let them know you would prefer the graphics they wish to use to be sent separately (attached to their email, or sent via flash drive or CD), this will allow you to use graphics to get “best results“.

And of course, you’ll want to set a deadline for contributions, and stick to it.

Setting up guidelines will help, but there are exceptions for every rule:

For text formatting headaches you have to deal with, I recommend the humble MS Notepad.

“Notepad is a washing machine for text.”

—Tracie Peters

Included under “Start–>programs–>Accessories”, Notepad is a VERY simple program. Its unable to “remember” formatting, which is why we love it.  If a copy/pasted block of text has formatting or style errors, paste it into Notepad.  Then, copy the block of text from Notepad and paste it into your document.  Voilà—plain vanilla text…no more formatting.

In the days of tall ships, sailors relied on the wind to fill their sails and move their vessels across the ocean. Sometimes the wind gave out and the ship was stuck dead in the water.

Now that summer is in full swing, is your bulletin stuck in the doldrums? Nothing is going on? Does it seem like the whole congregation is on vacation? Are you looking for something to fill up the blank spaces on your summer pages?

Here is one answer for Catholic weekly bulletins.

Go to LPi’s Art and Media Portal [ www.portal.4lpi.com ] and scroll through the pages for this week until you come to “Text – Reflection”. This is a three paragraph reflection on Sunday’s gospel. You can use all three paragraphs, or use any of the paragraphs alone. Since this is a text file, you may highlight the words you want with your mouse and copy and paste them into your publication. It is a great way to make your bulletin more meaningful.

Here is an answer for anyone with summer space to fill.

Try doing a keyword search for the word summer. There are many graphics on general summer themes like nature, sun, fishing, picnics, and so on. They might make your readers smile. Pair a fun summer graphic with one of these quotes:

Summer is the season when a man thinks he can cook better on an outdoor grill than his wife can on an indoor stove. —Anonymous

A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken. —James Dent

A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows. —St. Francis of Assisi

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability. —Sam Keen

Dirty hands, iced tea, garden fragrances thick in the air and a blanket of color before me, who could ask for more? —Bev Adams

[Don’t have access to LPi’s Art & Media Portal yet? Go to www.portal.4lpi.com and click Register.]

I enjoy cooking and baking, and of course eating what I just made. I am taking raw food such as vegetables, meat, spices, and oils, and making really great meals out of it all. It sounds like what so many of you do every week or every month when you create your publications out of the emails, notes and verbal messages you receive.

Of course, I can’t make new recipes every week and invariably there are also a few articles in every publication that must be shown regularly (sometimes every week). They are the reminders of the council meetings on Wednesday nights, the requests for food pantry donations, and the advertiser of the week (written June 9, 2009).

These articles are important! You can breathe new life into these blurbs and get them noticed almost every time they print. How? Here are some tips for making sure they get the proper attention:

• Use or change the border around the article/blurb.
• If you have the ability to add color, make the heading, shading, border or a few specific words pop!
• Shade the text box black (or the darkest shade of color) and make the text color white.
• Write 2 or 3 different versions of the same information and swap them out occasionally.
• Put a lot of white or blank space around it. Sometimes the absence of printing gets just as much notice.
• Add some vibrant clip art once in a while. There are a lot of great choices in LPi’s Art & Media Portal.

A really good idea is to look to other publications, even magazines including Bright Ideas, for creativity and inspiration. And if you are wondering how I make those standby meals interesting for my family? That’s easy. I just set the hot sauce on the table.

What do frozen pizza and LPi’s Art and Media Portal have in common?

Not a thing–unless you count the phrase “For best results…”.

Do your graphics look blurry?  Is the text hard to read?  Are there “jagged” edges that looked smooth when you saw it on screen?  Chances are, the graphic was copied and pasted from the web.

Web graphics are “dumbed down”–their quality is reduced–for display.  This allows a webpage to load quickly, showing the page to you faster.  However, this means that the “display” images on the web don’t have the quality needed to print clearly when transferred to paper!

“For best results” is one of those phrases seldom thought about–except when it isn’t followed.  Just like an overcooked pizza, low-resolution graphics can still be used–they’re just not as tasteful (tasty?).  The result of a less than proper graphic will be blurry, the edges jagged, any text almost illegible.

So…why go with less than optimal results if you can avoid it? With this thought in mind, here is a simple “For best Results”.

Following these directions will help avoid blurriness, difficult-to-read-text, and other pitfalls found when using graphic art.

When you have logged onto the AMp and selected the graphic you would like, please do the following.

1) Left-click the download button located below the graphic (or to the right of the graphic in the “expanded view”.

2) Choose to “save” the graphic to your Desktop, your My Pictures file, or some other location you find easy to access.

3) Open your publication (in Word, Publisher, Quark, Indesign, etc.) and go to the page where you would like the graphic.  (From here on in, the steps are different, depending on the program you use.)

4) Place the graphic according to your particular program.  for instance:

–In the various versions of MS Publisher, and MS word (pre-2007): choose the Insert command from the menu (Insert–>picture–>from file) to browse to the graphic, and double-click on the graphic to select it and place it on the page.

–In MS Word 2007: Click the Insert command, and select the Picture Icon from the Ribbon Menu. Browse to the graphic and double click to place it on the page.

(If you use Quark, Indesign, or other program to create your document, please speak to your tech support representative for additional assistance.)

This method will make certain you have a high-resolution graphic, with the proper color information.  (CMYK vs. RGB–a topic for another post.)

******************************************************************

It should be noted that there is an exception to this rule, as with most rules.  If you need a TEXT file from the AMp (scripture readings, verses, etc.) you can copy and paste the text information, because the text does not need to be “dumbed down” to display on the webpage.  (Again, please feel free to contact your tech support representative for more details, as formatting issues may occur.)

Please be advised that some files are stored on the AMp as both a Graphic (text as art) and a TXT (text as…well….text) file.  Your tech support rep can help you identify which is which as needed.

Question: Should every article in my publication have a headline?

 Answer: Headlines are important to readers because they help readers to navigate through your publication.

 Headlines are like road signs. Imagine you are looking for an address and you are driving in an unfamiliar area. You know the name of the street that you want to find. You just don’t know exactly where that street is located. As you are driving along, you look at the signs that tell you the name of each street you pass.

 If those signs are easily visible and the writing on them is large, you can drive past very fast and still catch the information on the sign. “This is Maple Street. The next street is Main Street.”

 If the signs are visually lost behind trees and other obstacles, you have to slow down and take a hard look as you pass. “Is this the street I have to turn on?”

 Poor road signs make you have to work much harder to get the information.

 What if the streets are not marked with a sign at all? How in the world would you know where you are going?

 The headlines that you create in your publication are like street signs. If the readers can see the headlines easily at a glance while they are travelling through your publication, they will know if they have found an article that they want to read.

 So, yes, always use headlines for articles because it helps readers find the information that they need. Headlines, like street signs, can be brief and still be effective.