creating hat overbars in MS office programs

king_arthur · Post by **king_arthur** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 6:49 am

Hi - I know we have a bunch of graphic artists here, maybe somebody can offer a suggestion:

My wife is a math teacher, and I have been fiddling with MS Publisher to try to set up test questions for her. I've been able to find most of the weird symbols I need, but the one thing I haven't found yet is a way I'm happy with to put barlines OVER a string of characters, to express the mean value of a variable or a line segment in geometry.

Font manipulation offers underlines, but not overbars. I can draw in overbars with the line tool, but then they don't move with text (the big difference between MSPub and MSWord is that in Pub, things stay where you put them, and I need that). I've played with the equation editor, but, again, an equation object doesn't move with text and it's also flaky about sizing (you can't tell it to size itself for 12-point text, you have to size the whole object to get the text the size you want). If I have a two-character string, it has to look like a single overbar, like underlines work.

I'm thinking that if I had a Times Roman- or Arial- like font that included uppercase letters with (full character width) overbars, that would take care of most of my problems, but I haven't stumbled across one yet. Or if there's some sort of a plugin that would create overbars the way MSPub creates underlines (font handling in MSPub is pretty much identical to that in MSWord). Or maybe there's a whole other approach I haven't thought of...

Thanks to anyone who has ideas... if I come up with a solution on my own, I'll follow-up here...

Charles (KA)

deshead · Post by **deshead** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 7:19 am

Does anything on this page help? http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/Overbar.htm

king_arthur · Post by **king_arthur** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 9:28 am

Thank you!

Unfortunately... if I try their trick with multiple characters (i.e., a single bar over TA), it puts separate bars on the two characters.

Also, Publisher doesn't seem to have Insert-Field - if it worked for what I need in Word, I would consider doing the whole project in Word...

Nonetheless, I have saved a copy of that page, because I'm sure I'll run into some other need to do character overstrikes.

Apparently, this whole "overbar a series of characters" is a common problem...

Charles

drë · Post by **drë** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 9:32 am

Not to sound like a Russian,,
but what about doing a simple
___________ _____ ___ _________
UNDERSCORE ABOVE THE CHARACTER.

roymond · Post by **roymond** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 9:35 am

My wife uses lots of special fonts for speech therapy, and there are various fonts for scientific uses, so I'd explore that. But I can't research it for you right now. I'm sure you can find them. You'd have to embed them into the document, or create PDFs with embedded fonts for them to transfer to others properly.

I won't comment on MS Publisher, other than it being less than an open format, and therefore having lots of proprietary display issues.

Rabid Garfunkel · Post by **Rabid Garfunkel** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 11:06 pm

Geez, MS Punisher

You ready Charles? Here we go. In plain english, what may work for you (though it's a right fiddly pain in the ass, even in this process' optimized state) is to: before the first character of each set of characters that you want to overscore, key in the MACRON character, then adjust (drastically reduce) the kerning of the macron and the first character so they're aligned on their left edge, then select just the macron and adjust its horizontal scale so it extends as far to the right as needed, and Bob's your uncle.

Yes, that passes for plain english when you're hacking around in Punisher.

Now for the more thorough (and less englishey) explanating:

Step 1
Launch Character Map (programs menu->Accessories->System Tools->Character Map) and find the MACRON character in the grid, after you've chosen the font you want to use. Now switch back to Punisher and place the text insertion blinky thingy left of the first character that you want to overscore. Switch back to Character Map and double click on the MACRON (or click the Insert button) and the MACRON should be inserted at the desired place in your Punisher document.

Or, if you're more comfortable with ASCII codes, in Punisher place the insertion point, hold down the ALT key, key in "0175" (no quotes), release the ALT key and the MACRON should show up.

Step 2
It's Punisher the rest of the way from here. Select the MACRON (yeah, I'm really enjoying keying that word) and the first character of the word that you want overscored. If the auto-word select gives you grief, just shift-right arrow twice. Go to Format menu->Character Spacing. Go to the Kerning pop-up menu and select "Condense". In the "By this amount" field key in a number (the point size of the font you're using is a good starting place). Click the "Apply" button to preview, and change the number up or down until you're satisfied with the alignment. When it's good, click "OK".

Step 3
Put the insertion point to the left of the MACRON, and select just the MACRON. If that's troublesome, shift-right arrow once instead. If you've got the MACRON selected, the insertion point will appear to stop blinking. Bring up your Measurement Palette (double-click the page dimensions in the bottom right of the document window, unless you know the real way to do it... I don't). See the capital A with the arrows sticking out of each side, a la Steve Martin? Change the "100%" to something bigger. If you key in an enlargement that's too big, the MACRON will start hanging over the left side of the word as well as the right.

That's it, good luck, and if you come across a more streamlined way of doing this, please let me know. Hey cool, I learned something today applicable to my job, and on the company's dime even! Ah the joys of pre-press

Afterword: asking my coworkers about this got the unanimous reply of "Use InDesign".

That's what passes for humor at print shops, I'm afraid.

MACRON MACRON MACRON MACRON MACRON, heh.

Rabid Garfunkel · Post by **Rabid Garfunkel** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 11:57 pm

deshead wrote:Does anything on this page help? http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/Overbar.htm

Oh hey, the MACRON! Heh, it's everywhere!

king_arthur · Post by **king_arthur** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 7:22 am

Thank you Rabid! Here's how I actually used your trick:

type: alt-0175 m alt-0175 m (working in 12 pt Times Roman)

select each of the "m" characters and Format - Font - Small Caps, so that the top of the letters doesn't hit the macron... I may wind up doing this in 14 or 16 pt. so that the "small caps" are the same size as normal caps in the text, we'll see... yeah, I did wind up doing that...

double click the object size to bring up the Adjuster gizmo

select each macron character, do Adjust "A" width up to 200%

kern each pair of characters together at -10 points (this can be done in the Adjust menu as well, I may fiddle with that exact value some more)

if necessary, adjust the two overprinted characters closer together

I now have "MM" with overbars that join. I can copy and paste that string to a safe place, and then copy and paste it back into my document wherever I want.

By placing the cursor to the RIGHT of the whole string and left-cursor / backspacing through the string, I can change the "mm" characters (which I chose because "M" is a nice wide character, so when I switch to some other character, I don't wind up with a space in the overbar) to "rg" or whatever characters I need (after doing this a couple times, it became obvious when I was on a character). The final overbar may hang over a bit if the last character is a narrow one, but if it ever becomes critical, I know how to custom-create a pair with a better fit. But I don't have to custom-create EVERY pair of characters.

Right now, I'm just doing geometry tests, so I just need to do two uppercase letters with an overbar (a line segment). The cool thing about this solution is that the overbar is now tied to the letters, it's not a graphic that moves if I resize the containing frame, it can go in the top line of text in a frame (don't have to burn a line above to put underlines), and I can apply bold or italic to the letters (which you can't do with the equation editor).

Because this is done with kerning, if I change the font size of the whole gizmo, the alignment goes all whack. But, again, now that I know how to do this, if I need a 36 pt set of characters with overbars, I can create that and copy/paste it the same way, using 30 pts of kerning or whatever...

Thanks - and thanks for taking the time to type all that stuff in!

Charles (KA)

Rabid Garfunkel · Post by **Rabid Garfunkel** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 12:39 pm

No problem, Charles! Absurd solutions to insane problems, in pre-press anyway, are a specialty. Nice solution. Sometimes it's nice to use a program that forces you to figure out things for yourself. Well, if you're getting paid for it, that is

fodroy · Post by **fodroy** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:40 pm

Help and how to this shiz.