Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Stephen Shead <sshead.email AT gmail.com>]

Hi Chris,

I'll see if I can help somewhat.

First of all, do you have to submit it as a MS Word document? Do you have the option to submit it as a PDF? It would potentially solve a great many problems (particularly with fonts) if you could - that's the point of PDF, really.

If not, would it help to embed the fonts in the Word file? Don't know how to do it in Word 2010, but at least in 2007, the option to do that is under the "Save" section of the Word Options dialog.
 

Please help. I am attempting to submit the final draft of my Th.M. thesis in Turabian Humanities format as a Microsoft Word 2010 document. I am running Windows 7 (64-bit) on an HP Elitebook 8540p.

Here are the problems I am encountering:

1.) Greek fonts (particularly vowels with rough breathing marks) come up with little boxes in place of some characters.

I have attempted to replace the fonts with Unicode and remove formatting, but this does not resolve the issue.

2.) Hebrew fonts insert too much space for a defective cholem. I have attempted to replace the fonts with Unicode, to remove formatting, and to key in the Hebrew manually, but this does not resolve the issue.

Is this a problem on your computer, or when you submit it? Word should be able to handle Hebrew and Greek really well. What fonts are you using?

3.) Orphaned footnotes. I have attempted to resolve all issues with orphaned footnotes, but nothing seems to resolve them all.

*Part of the problem seems to be that Turabian Humanities format requires skipping one line between footnotes. Inserting a carriage return after each footnote throws off Word's automatic controls.
Can I set the footnotes to insert a blank line automatically after each note, but without double-spacing the text in the notes themselves?

This is a notorious issue in Word - and different versions of Word have different problems. This should help: http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/footnoteondiffpage.htm

With the extra line after each footnote: Hitting Enter at the end of a footnote shouldn't throw off any of Word's automatic controls. I've made documents with multi-line footnotes, even with different styles for the first and subsequent lines.

But at any rate, putting a manual new line at the end of each footnote would be an ugly solution. Are you familiar with editing styles? (If not, learn - it's by far the best way to go.) You can simply edit the "Footnote Text" style and give it the appropriate "After" amount in the Paragraph Spacing section.

 

4.) Hanging headers. Subheadings get orphaned when my thesis readers open the document in Word at their end. This doesn't happen in every instance.

Again, PDF ... but if that's not possible, it seems strange. What do you mean "orphaned"? Do you mean the rest of the page after the subheading is blank, and the text following it is thrown to the next page? Or something different?

 

5.) Also, is there a good tool for generating proper citations in Turabian Humanities? I've always found Turabian to be tough to navigate.

Particularly, I need to make sure I properly cite individually-titled, multi-volume works with a general editor. Examples in my paper include specific volumes from the Word Biblical Commentary series, the Anchor Bible commentaries, and similar works.

Actually, the examples you cite aren't really "multi-volume works". They are individual books, but in a series. The series title follow the book title, in normal text and no inverted commas. I don't think the series editor is necessary. Are you using tradition references or author-date style? If it's the more tradition, for example, you might have:

Pope, Marvin H. Job: Introduction, translation, and notes. Anchor Bible 15. New York: Doubleday, 1965.

In terms of a "tool", are you using any kind of electronic referencing software tool at the moment, or just doing it all by hand?

 

Any help you can give me on these issues is most appreciated.

Sincerely,

Chris Lovelace

Regards,

Stephen Shead

Santiago, Chile