[gui-talk] turning off those fancy punctuation, etc. styles in Word 2000

[Joel Deutsch]

    I know many people won't be using word 2000. It's just my habit because 
I'm comfortable with the way its Thesaurus function works and never figured 
out how to use the more complicated one in my Word 2003. It's nothing to do 
with liking or not liking the offerings of synonyms in one or the other 
version. It's the mechanics of the newer one I don't like.

anyway, so much for excuses. But here's where you could get rid of Word's 
attempts to help you type things that look more print-like, and just settle 
for DOS or typewriter-style characters. You can toggle on and off em dashes, 
smart quotes (bent in a little in the correct direction, so that the left 
ones look like left quotes and the right ones like right quotes, instead of 
them all looking like ordinary straight-line typewriter style apostrophes. 
Which is fine if you prefer. It's another trick Word offers to make your 
copy look more like printing. You can turn off the em dash, so that next 
time you type two dashes together, that's all they'll look like, two dashes 
with a tiny space between them. Then Jaws will just say "dash dash," not "em 
dash."

also, you can make it so fractions don't print as fractions but as a number, 
a slash and a number, and other such things, such as stopping those 
superscripts and subscripts.

Now, in other versions of word, I don't know where in the menus, or in that 
ribbon deal with the new one,  that stuff can be done. But this is how it's 
grouped in Word 2000 under tools/auto correct/format as you type. that last 
being one of several tabs in a multi-tab dialogue.

If you look around your menus in your own version of Word, and look for 
options that sound like these, you'll find these types of settings. Explore. 
One thing to note, idiosyncratic as it may seem: The stuff above is *not* in 
the tools/options dialogue tabs. They considered these things to be in a 
different category, and as if that weren't odd enough, they put this group 
of settings under the menu item auto correct, which isn't intuitive at all 
if you're imagining that none  of this has to do with correcting anything, 
but simply setting stuff. But their spaced-out connection (okay, I'm 
actually thinking hickening kind of stoned, actually) is to create an 
association with having Word simply *change* two dashes typed together into 
an em dash, and think of that as a "correction." Well, it ain't no 
correction, unless you have some style guide you're working from that says 
"never ever type two dashes for a double dash. Always correct that to a true 
em dash." Okay, mom. Whatever. Who writes these things. What were they 
smoking that night in Seattle? What kind of pizza had they been eating and 
washing down with one can of Diet coke after another?

But I go on.