large brackets/braces

  • Thread starter Thread starter Richard
  • Start date Start date
R

Richard

Is there any way to get large (2 or more lines) brackets into a word 2007
document WITHOUT using the equation function.

I need large brackets for linguistic notation and I also need to be able to
control formatting within the brackets without being constrained by the
equation function.

The main problem with the equation formatting is that the text will always
be aligned to the centre within the brackets and I want it aligned left.

Thanks for any help.
 
To do what you want in the equation editor, first insert the bracket; within
the placeholder, insert a 1-column-by-2-row matrix; select the two matrix
placeholders, right-click, choose Column Alignment > Left; and enter your
notation.

To do it without the equation editor, type the notation as plain text,
aligned as you like. Click Insert > Shapes and choose the bracket (left or
right) from the Basic Shapes group. Drag a narrow bounding box to the proper
height, and size and position it as needed.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Not to toot my own horn, or anything, but if you'll have a look at my
chapter "Chomsky 1951a and Chomsky 1951b" in the just-published
*Chomskyan (R)evolutions*, ed. Douglas Kibbee (Benjamins, 2010),
you'll find that I've transcribed some of the incredibly complicated
formulas from Chomsky's M.A. thesis (as published, they were simply
done with a typewriter and handwritten braces etc.) into Word fields.

No one in the last fifty years of linguistics has used formulas as
complicated as those, but once you understand how the field codes
work, their construction is quite straightforward.

Word used to come with a "Manual" that contained an Appendix
explaining every field option and all the parameters of every switch.
(The material doesn't appear to be preserved anywhere within the Help
system.) To left-align inside a brace, you just add a parenthesis with
the appropriate label.
 
Oh my. I had completely forgotten about all the amazing things that
can be done with EQ fields.

Richard, try this (using Ctrl+F9 to create the pairs of field
brackets; the bracket that follows \b\lc\ is just a typed bracket):

{ EQ \b\lc\{({ EQ \a\al (This is line one,This is line two)}) }

If you can't find the topic on the EQ field in the Word help (if you
have Word 2007, it either isn't there or isn't indexed), it's online
at
http://office.microsoft.com/assista...10227131033&QueryID=WKCH77ZvV0&respos=14&rt=2

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.
 
Kewl ... that, IIRC, is a tiny part of the Appendix to the Word 5.0
Manual. Is more of it to be found elsewhere?

For Richard, the left/right/center alignment in the braces is covered
under "Array."
 
The entire set of help topics about specific fields can be reached from the
Field Reference page at
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/CH061047231033.aspx. This is a copy
of the corresponding section of the offline help from Word 2003.

I know from conversations that the Office documentation team is severely
understaffed. It's my understanding that they expected to re-use the Word
2003 field topics for Word 2007 because nothing had changed; but the Word
2007 help indexing mechanism was never told to look in the Word 2003 online
help for fields. As a result the material is invisible to Word, although
Google can find it.
 
That does explain a lot ... but is there a reason they haven't fixed
it in four years?
 
Back
Top