Using the Microsoft Word Templates

Some people have, well, not exactly had problems with the templates, but they're not getting the best out of them, because the toolbars (along with their keyboard shortcuts) don't appear.

This is to do with how their version of MS Word is set up, and I'm not going to try to get them to change that, so here's a primer:

RULE 1:
Never click the buttons for Bold, Italic, etc. (unless you want to).  Use styles.

Word is style based, meaning that every text format you use has a "style", which says what it looks like.  These styles are really easy to create, once you've had ten minutes experience of doing it, and using them rather than the "quick" buttons makes your life a lot easier – especially if your installation is configured to "Update Styles Automatically" (which means that if you convert one line of text to bold, half the bloody document turns bold, because it was in the same style as the line you amended).

I'll concentrate on Comic.dot, here, because it has been downloaded more than the MS template (which strikes me as strange, but there you go).

(By the way, "MS" stands for "ManuScript", not "Microsoft").

Comic.dot uses five styles ("CPage", "CPanel", "CSPEECH", "MSItalic", and MSLeft").  Those are the ONLY styles you need, to script a comic.

CPage is the style that is used for heading a new page.  It is bold and underlined.

CPanel is the style that is used for heading a panel.  Basically, it is MSLeft + Bold.

CSPEECH is the style that is used for dialogue.  It is all caps, with a tab set, so that you can type the name of the character who speaks, hit tab, then type what he says, and everything lines up nicely.

MSItalic is the style that is used for italics (in a manuscript, italics are not used.  Words that are to be printed in italics are underlined, not italicised).

And MSLeft is for plain text, which is used to describe the graphical content of a panel.

You do not need any other styles.  That is all of them.

If you want a single word in bold: Type it, select it, then hit the CPanel button, not the "B" button.

...  But if you don't have a CPanel button, you have to create one.

On my machines, when I open a new document with the MS or Comic templates, an additional toolbar appears.  The one for the Comic template has five buttons, for the five styles that are used.

If your copy of Word does not show this toolbar, you have to create it -- Tools > Customise > Toolbars > New.

When you click the "New" button, a mini dialogue box will appear, asking you for the name of the new toolbar, and what template it should be made available to.  Give it a name (I very creatively named mine "Comics"), and make it available to Comic.dot (this way, it will only show up when you are working on a comic script).

An empty toolbar will appear, somewhere within the Word window.

Go to the "Commands" tab of the dialogue box, and scroll the left listbox down to select "Styles".

Drag and drop one of the five Comic styles (listed above) from the right-hand listbox to the new toolbar, then right-click on the button that appears, and choose "Default Style".

The button will then become a square with nothing in it.

Right-click on it again, and choose "Edit Button Image...".

This will bring up a mini graphics editor, allowing you to draw a glyph or a letter for the button, so that you can recognise it.

Note that you can go back and edit the glyph as many times as you like, by going back to the "Customise..." dialogue and right-clicking on the button; so you don't have to get it perfect first time.

When you are done with the glyph, close the glyph editor, and click the "Keyboard..." button.

Locate the command for the button you just created ("Styles" on the left; the style name on the right), and assign a keyboard shortcut to it.  This makes a BIG difference!  When you are typing, you don't want to have to keep reaching for the mouse!

Repeat the process for the other four styles, and the job's done.

From then, whenever you open a new Comic document, that toolbar will appear, and the shortcut keys will be available.

That is, it will work the same way for you that it does for me -- and I'm a lazy sod, so I've made it easy for myself.

If you downloaded MS.dot, do the same thing for the styles used therein.  If you want to use both, it'll be less work, because some of the styles are common to both templates.