Hey guys,
This is actually two in one. First, a little known Word fact–if you add in lines, arrows, etc as drawing elements in Word, they’ll maintain their relationship to the text you place them near, even if they’re floating above the text, and not in-line with the text.
Second, a cool big-but-little trick I discovered that makes notating scripts in word super easy. In the “Table” menu, there’s a sub-menu labeled “Convert”. If you go into that, you can choose to convert your selected text to a table. Once you’ve made your initial edits to the script, and are ready to start dropping notations in, use this feature, telling it to divide cells based on paragraphs. It’ll turn your script into a table, dividing rows roughly after each character name and line. Then, by adding columns to the left and right, as needed, it’s super easy to add notes that stay in line with the text, without having to mess with text boxes and stuff like that. It’s also easy to bulk-format those notes, since you can select an entire column. This is what I do to add VCA number notations in the left margin of my mixing scripts, but it’s pretty useful for all sorts of notations for SMs, too.
–Andy, who now is headed back to his current script-notation session in Word, and cursing at the wonkiness of how Word 2008 inserts graphic elements and text boxes. Aargh.