Salutations™!!
Whew! My eyes are cross-eyed, now. I just spent the better part of two hours retyping only select pages of a rental agreement for ma père and ma mère in conjunction as a piece of property that they own (they own several pieces). Only select pages you ask?
Yep…
Yeah, only select pages. They had an agreement that they had used from another renter and the lawyers had drawn that up. There was only certain parts that needed to be changed. Now, there may be some program that allows you to scan a hard copy document and then edit said document but I don’t know of it, or how. But, because I knew he had a deadline and I type about 80-90 wpm on a good day, I told him to bring it to me. Now, the original document was from a form that the attorney’s use, a “fill-in-the-blank-and-output-a-complete-document” type form. So it was probably some custom made thingy and I had to try to match the format, justification, font and spacing, all whilst working around Word 2013’s insistence that its own format was going to be used. I had to do some kerning and that sucked. Also, I had to take into account that pages 2, 3, 4, 7 and 9 were good, so I only had to do certain pages. The negative of that? I had to make sure it didn’t look like there was a sentence fragment that looked chopped off at the end of a page.
For example, the line: “Upon termination of this Lease, the Tenant shall surrender the Premises in good and clean condition and repair, excepting only normal wear and tear and damage by fire and other casualty damage by insurance and paid to the Landlord.” is used in the document. Not a problem except that on page ‘9’ begins the part: “…by fire and other casualty…” On the original, the “…wear and tear and damage…” goes to the end of the page because it was in the form that way. There was really no way to keep it from having “…damage…” from being in the middle of the page on that bottom line. Some of it just will have to be dealt with. I told ma père that he’ll eventually need to have the whole thing retyped, either by me or the lawyer. He said okay. The editor in me also had a hard time not fixing the problems I saw from the original document. I had to make sure that I wasn’t stepping on the legalese but there were commas and semicolons that had no business being in there. Oxford commas and the after-period double space were prevalent, too.
I’m sure that there are some typesetters or Word experts (I thought I was) that could tell me how to skirt around this and that there’s probably some prog or app that will allow the scanning and editing of a hard copy, and I’d love to hear that for future reference but I did what I had to do. Let me know if you have suggestions.
Until tomorrow, same blog channel…
Scorp out!
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“My life needs editing.” – Mort Sahl
