Wednesday, 8 May 2013

Pilcrow beats mouse

Introducing the pilcrow or, less elegantly, the paragraph mark.  I wrote earlier about keyboard shortcuts and how they can change your life: "...mouse-work requires a lot of static muscle activity from wrist to shoulder, which leads to lactic acid build up (it's hard for this by-product of activity to flush out if the muscles aren't pulsed), which increases fatigue, muscle mass, deep-vein thrombosis and death...". Now that the teaching year has finished I can expand a little in this arena.  A table of the life-enhancing mousifuge shortcuts that I use every day:

<ctrl>+b:  bold
<ctrl>+u: underline
<ctrl>+i: italics
<ctrl>+c: copy
<ctrl>+x: cut
<ctrl>+v: paste
<ctrl>+z: undo last cmd
<ctrl>+s: save
<ctrl>+p: print
<ctrl>+l: left para
<ctrl>+e: centre para
<ctrl>+r: right para
<ctrl>+ ]: increase font
<ctrl>+<shift>+=: superscript
<ctrl>+j: justify para
<ctrl>+ [: decrease font
<ctrl>+ =: subscript
<ctrl>+g: goto [page]
<ctrl>+ h: find&replace
<ctrl>+ k: make hypertext
<ctrl>+<shift>+*: pilcrow

Edit 27/05/2013: Want a € sign? <ctrl>+<alt>+4 or <ctrl>+<alt>+e both work or (ευχαριστίες (tnx) Chris Ergatides) <AltGr>+4.
 
<ctrl>+h find & replace is normally used to replace all instances of psuedogene with pseudogene, but, with the handy <ctrl>+a to highlight the whole document, you can better control document format.  In the <ctrl>+h world ^t is a tab, ^l is new line, ^p is a paragraph. Most people create white-space between paragraphs by hitting the <return> key twice. With <ctrl>+h you can [replace all] the, lazy, ugly, uncontrolled rtn+rtn paragraphs with a single rtn:
Find what : ^p^p
Replace with: ^p
WTF who cares??  You will care if you have to cram your florid prose into a specified number of pages - say for a form, a 2 page CV or a grant-application, or to get the page-count down to a multiple of four that you can print as a booklet. You can then specify/reduce the space between paragraphs, so that there is white space enough - 6pt, say, rather than the default 12pt - but not so much as to require another page in your document.


And finally <alt>+o,t will take you to the tab menu.  From there you can control your tabs and make your documents neater and more readable and not prone to schlub into a mess if you increase the font-size or change it from Times New Roman to Calibri.    Here's a more comprehensive list of  of shortcuts; thanks bernd and amp.  TMFS? Sure!

1 comment:

  1. for once on this blog i can say - i knew some of this!think ctrl+A is my favourite labour saving shortcut, a must, particularly when using a laptop

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