With my eldest daughter immersing herself in college applications and preparing to take some early college courses in January, academic headlines have caught my eye here and there. Here's one for Mac users of Word 2004, from About.com Word Processing Guide James Marshall: Tools for Creating Academic and Research Papers in Word 2004. He shows how to charts, captions, footnotes, and page numbers into your Word documents. He also has instructions for all Word users in Formatting Academic Research Papers With Word which has individual tutorials for footnotes, endnotes, table of contents, and tables too.

And while we're on the topic of academic papers...

• Top Resources for Writing a Research Paper
• How to Write a Research Paper
• Samples for Formatting an MLA Report
• Turabian Style Guide
• General Rules for APA Format
• The Chicago Manual of Style

Free software is great. But free isn't necessarily better in every way. But for some people free software does everything they need it to do.

Graphics Software Guide Sue Chastain reviews the new Picasa 3. While she says advanced users might want to pass on this one, it's near perfect for beginners:

"Picasa has just about everything home users will need for working with and sharing their personal digital photos. Version 3 is a great step forward for what was already an excellent photo manager for beginners. Best of all, it's free!" read complete review

For in-house and freelance designers, sticking with the often pricey industry standards (such as InDesign or QuarkXPress or Photoshop) may be the best choice for maximum compatibility, features, and support. But for everyone else -- home users, small business owners -- free may be all you need. Consider some of these very capable freebies:

• Free Windows Software for Desktop Publishing
• Free Mac Software for Desktop Publishing
• Free Open Source Desktop Publishing Options <-- small business owners and self-publishers, check this out.
• Free Graphics Software

A lot of desktop publishing programs include Web publishing features that let you turn your print pages into Web pages. But for extensive Web site authoring, you'll generally get better results using programs specifically for HTML and all it's variations. About.com Web Design/HTML Guide Jennifer Krynin has a poll up asking what program comes to mind first when you hear the term Web Editor? Not necessarily what you use, but what's the first program that pops into your head? Dreamweaver pops into my head (and more than half the people taking her poll) although I've never used it. I used to do all my Web page creation using Notetab, a plain text editor.

Take the Web Editor poll and discuss your answer.

In the forum Trinity is looking for a faster or more efficient way to add multiple instances of non-breaking spaces in InDesign. She writes,

"Right now I am handling this by going to Character > No Break (InDesign CS3), as that still allows the Adobe paragraph composer to keep the line breaks in the paragraph still somewhat balanced... using the No Break option manually is time consuming." read full message

Because of where she needs to insert these non-breaking spaces, using Find/Change would require several operations. My first thought is to create a script to do all the Find/Change operations in "one click" throughout the document. What would you recommend? Do you have experience with InDesign scripting? How easy is it to set up? Come discuss it with us.