by Paul Beverley
Our recent macro survey shows how much editors value the speed and accuracy gains available, but here I want to concentrate on one of your favourites, FRedit, which for me is the best macro ever.
- Good news: FRedit is potentially the best macro ever
- Bad news: It’s quite a challenge to get started
But our experience as macro trainers is that many editors once felt exactly the same about macros:
- Good news: Macros can potentially save you lots of time
- Bad news: It’s quite a challenge to get started
So what are your ‘best macros’ according to our Editors Macro Survey (spring 2024)?
- 1 CaseThisWord
- 2 DocAlyse
- 3= GoogleFetch
- 3= [Dictionary]Fetch
- 5 ProperNounAlyse
- 6 FRedit
- 7 HyphenAlyse
- 8 CitationAlyse
- 9= NumberToTextUK / US
- 9= HighlightPlus
As you can see, FRedit is only number six – I wonder why?
Well, if you look at the other nine macros, I’d say that, conceptually, each is moderately straightforward, and it would be easy for you to explain its function to a macro-newbie. Not so with FRedit.
So is it worth the effort of learning? Well, you could ask a colleague who uses it, but you could just trust my experience, especially when you know that I started using a FRedit-like tool in an Apple-related application 37 years ago!
This technique really does work, and it’s powerful even if you only use it at a relatively simple level.
So what happened 37 years ago that generated this tool? I was using two computers, an Apple Mac Plus and an Archimedes computer from Acorn Computers in Cambridge, UK, to create an Acorn-based magazine.
Each month, I needed to transfer the Apple text across to the Acorn, but the Apple used dashes, ligatures (fi, fl), curly quotes and bullets (•), which I had to convert back to hyphens, ‘proper’ letter pairs, straight quotes and asterisks. (Yes, I know, but this was 37 years ago!)
So I did it by using a series of global F&Rs and, in case I forgot any, I kept a list of them all on one piece of paper. Then one day I thought: ‘Hang on! Couldn’t a computer program do this for me?!’ So someone in the Acorn community wrote one, and all I then had to do was to open a file containing a list of all the changes:
fi|fi
fl|fl
‘|’
’|’
etc
And that’s it! You now understand the principle of FRedit, so download a copy of the learning material FRedit from Square One and get started. (FSO was written by ace trainer Jennifer Yankopolus.)
We need training
But to be fair, it isn’t that easy a concept to get your head around, so we do need training. So why not get onto the training group in your professional body and encourage them to create a short course to teach how to use this powerful tool.
But the good news is that EFA already have such a course: Macros from A to Z: six weekly sessions, with one week devoted solely to FRedit, and it’s run by the top world macro-trainer, Jennifer Yankopolus. For news of the next running of the course, see Jennifer’s training page:
Taking it further
While FRedit can save you time even if you only use it in fairly simple ways, it is potentially an extremely powerful system with a wealth of facilities that you could gradually learn to use. As the years go by, you could get FRedit to do more and more of the mundane aspects of your work.
Today, FRedit has
- 17-page user manual
- 22 videos on YouTube (from beginners to advanced)
- 107-page FRedit library of applications
- 22 other FRedit-related macros, e.g. HyphenationToFRedit or ProperNounToFRedit
‘Invest time to save time’ – it’s definitely worthwhile in the long run.
Paul Beverley, paul@archivepub.co.uk