Creating Style Sets From Scratch for Legal Documents

[Rene]

I want to create style sets that will have up to 9 heading styles with
complex formatting for Word, such as two line breaks between the level 1
"Article I" number, and the paragraph itself, among other things. Shall I
create a new style for each of them in the Quick Style gallery first, then
save the style set as a new one, or is it best - and simpler - to open a
document which has all those styles built-in, already, then simply save it as
a new style set? A secretary would need to create 5 or 6 different style sets
like this to make Word really useful, simple to use and meaningful to her
daiily workload

 

[DeanH]

Have a look at the following article which contains very handy tips for
handling styles, also see the other topics on the left pane:
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/stylesms/index.html
Also see http://word.mvps.org/faqs/customization/CreateATemplatePart1.htm
for tips on creating templates that can hold all the "sets" the secretary
needs.

"two line breaks between the level 1 "Article I" number, and the paragraph
itself"
By "line breaks" I assume you mean pressing the "return", this is bad
practise for spacing reasons, instead the style for Level 1 "Article" should
include Spacing After of a certain amount to create the space reguired. I
would also recommend setting the "Keep With Next" attribute for this style,
to ensure the text stays with the following paragraph at page wraps.
Hope this helps
DeanH

 

[Rene]

DeanH

I haven't yet looked at the article or the post, but assume they'll be
valuable, as usual, so thanks for an educational reply.

As for the line break, it's also called a soft return, or the equivalent of
pressing Shift with the Enter key. In legal documents, some numbered
paragraphs, such as articles in a corporate document, or points in a
litigation document, need to have a visual separation of the outline number
itself from the usual one sentence that follows, while preserving the status
of same paragraph attributes, especially for Table of Contents purposes.
Third-party software makes it easy for these "tricks" to take place and for a
quick TOC to be easily generated without any marking, nor TC fields. It would
look like this:

ARTICLE I

DEFINITIONS

The sentence, or fragment, that comes visually two lines below the
automatically generated number "ARTICLE I (II, III, etc.) is linked to the
number, is part of the same paragraph as ARTICLE I, or whatever number it may
be at. Manual Line break is the term used in the Special button of the Find
and Replace dialog. Sorry for going on about this, but it is one complaint of
the legal community that Word (or Word programmers in MS) does (do) not
strive to understand their word processing needs and maketheir lives easy.

If I have any more questions after reading the documents/articles you refer
to in here, I'll post, or reply with clarification requests. Unless you tell
me I should direct inquiries/comments, etc to the Word blog team. Thanks,
again, for the great answers and the great benefit you guys provide us here.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Instead of a line break here, you might want to consider using two separate
paragraphs and styles, one for the article number and one for the article
title. To see an example of how this can work in practice, see
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/TOCTips.htm#UnnumberedHeadings

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[DeanH]

Rene.
"Manual Line Breaks" you describe them perfectly, but in this intance do
these not give you extra spaces in the TOC?
Have a look at the following article,
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/TOCTips.htm
especially the "Adding numbering to unnumbered headings" section (some way
down) which describes exactly what you require, without the use of TC fields,
maybe this can help you develop your template without the need for
Third-party software (which software?).
Don't worry about the "going on", you will see that quite often here ;-)
Come back to this forum anytime you have the need, that is what it is for.
All the best
DeanH

 

[DeanH]

Rene
Forgot to say, have a look at the website by Ben M. Schorr - MVP.
http://www.officeforlawyers.com
Hope this helps
DeanH