Topic Formatting issues revisited

Topic Formatting issues revisited is a class teaching good practice and principles in making or creating theWord modules, as far as creating topics.

Naming conventions and Norms in Religious Literature

Careful review and study the image below.

As a module creator you can do anything you want. But the users that use your module should be your first consideration. What confuses them, don’t do, and what they would find as helpful, try making that a practice in your module creations.

In this image, first of all, note that the first block is the best. Each topic has an Arabic numeral before it. I would say that this should be the naming norm, Arabic numeral, period, 1 space title of  the chapter. We should not use colons, nor semi-colons, nor dashes. And please no double dashes or extra long dashes.

The second block has no numbers. I don’t think that is helpful. Under the title, you should have numbers on the topics. In the third and following levels, numbers are optional in my opinion.

The third block has roman numerals. Let me just say this. Many years ago, all preachers seemed to both know and readily use roman numerals instead of Arabic numbers, and this is how they designed their sermons. So the conversion was very easy since everybody used them (Roman numeral).

But today, we live in a lazy and ignorant society where people seem to think it too much to learn the conversions. Even with internet sites to use to convert Roman to Arabic, nobody can do it. So as a module creator, we should do the conversion for them. Within the text of the chapters, Bible references will not tooltip as Roman numerals, so you have to convert them to Arabic for your readers and for theWord to tooltip them.

Roman numerals are shorter 1 through 10, but as you go up in the numbers greater than 10, you start getting into longer digits to represent a number. 78 is only 2 digits, but in Roman numerals, it is LXXVIII. So I would refrain from using Roman numerals for chapter numbers.

Not adding leading zeros

Consider this image below.

This is the title page for your work. Notice how this module creator named it, “00 title.” As I have constantly observed before, the 00 of the title is a hold over for eSword. They HAVE TO PUT IT THERE, or that topic will go to the bottom. But we in theWord don’t need to do so.

So what does it matter? Actually, it does matter (at least to me). Unlike apparently a lot of these module makers, I actually use and read works from my library. So in the normal daily use of theWord, how does this enter in? Well, it doesn’t matter much except to remember you what work you are working in. It is in the very top line of the image also. But when you search, for example on atonement. You can search only topic names, or topic content, or both. Searching only for topic names, and PRESUMING YOU PUT THE WORK AUTHOR AND NAME IN THE TITLE TOPIC, you will get a hit in the search results with this work. Otherwise, you have to search using the name of the module search feature. If none of the other topics have the word atonement in it, then the work won’t show up. It is frustrating to know you have works on something, but they are not showing up in the search results. The reason for this is poor module creation.

Here the name of that topic is better “Meldau The Messiah in Both Testaments”.

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