A friend of my wife is writing a book so she roped me in to help guide with the technical side, luckly not the content. The book sounds really boring and doubt it will sell, but thats not my problem.
Many years ago I taught courses at the University on word processing, mainly to professionnel companies who had staff using word 5 for Dos, then word 2 for windows or lotus Amipro… no problems. Page layout, headers footers, styles, left and right pages, margins, gutters, Indexing, table of contents, fonts, land scape portrait … week long courses so very detailed. You name it I covered it. Add in file management and the stuff around the system. Both Apple and Dos or Windows.
Back to the question Really simple stuff to start with. By the way I know how to use the tools not how they work !
Spell checking, easy, you type a word its wrong it underlines it so you right click and it offers a correct version, or if auto correct it set it changes it without telling you. If its a error you make often you can set up auto correct to do that as well.
So the wordprocessing tool (in this case libre office) has a dictionary of words to look at and uses that, plus it adds your known errors to the list.
No problem with that part.
But then we got to grammar and I found I could not easy answer how it worked, in french (like some other languages) we have formal and informal (vous and tu) so the content of a paragraph or sentence is totally different.
So is there a similar table of formats to look at if using one form or another ?
If the book has both formats used can you define this is formal and this is informal ?
The next part was tracking changes.
Easy switch on revision marking.
So you have the old line of text with a line through or different colour. Then the new line of text after the correction.
But is that the best way or do you have another idea ?
The author of the book did not want me to just say it works but wanted to know how, more than just click the spell check button…
Some may comment on dont use libre office but use X or Y instead but it would still be the same questions no matter which tool is used.