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How To
Hello and thanks for reading this tutorial on this AF bullet writing tool that I am making.
The basic intent of this tool is to provide a more user-friendly method of editing bullets. Here are the fundamental problems that I am trying to address:
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Since it's PARAMOUNT that each bullet fits in exactly one line with as little white space as possible, you're pretty much forced to do all mid- and final- level bullet creative writing/editing on the actual PDF itself, so that you know that formatting and spacing is correct.
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Doing actual writing and editing on the actual PDFs suck. The EPR/OPR PDFs only have a few lines of space, and if you try to type more than what can fit, the PDF will stop accepting your inputs. Because of this, most people end up borrowing other sections of the PDF for text storage, or copy-pasting bullets to and from Microsoft Word for bullet storage... a huge waste of time and mental effort.
At its core, the purpose of this tool is to provide a never-ending textbox with an accurate representation of how bullet text will appear on Air Force PDFs.
Starting from scratch? Or maybe you have a Microsoft Word doc with a huge list of stolen bullets from your predecessor, subordinate(s), supervisor(s), coworkers, or randomly found online?
The first thing you are going to want to do is to paste that list or otherwise input text into the left text area, the one labeled INPUT BULLETS HERE. When you do that, you should see your copy-pasted text also appear on the righthand side, in the area labeled VIEW OUTPUT HERE.
You'll find that some or most of the text may be red. That's because the website did some measurements and determined that (per arbitrary Air Force standards), there is too much whitespace at the end of your bullet, or your bullet is too long and it overflowed the line.
How does this tool know if I'm working on an EPR, OPR, or award package? Good question! The tool actually has no idea, so I have implemented a number input box at the top of the page for this exact purpose. In the box, you have to specify the exact millimeter width of the input form that you are trying to use, down to three decimal places.
If you're like most people and don't know this measurement, you can click on the AWD, EPR, or OPR buttons to the right of the input box to input some values I have predetermined. Note that coincidentally, AF1206 and AF910/AF911 have the same form widths, so they both will appear highlighted if you have the input width set to 202.321 millimeters.
Once you modify the width, the website will adjust the input and output text area widths and re-measure how "well" your bullets fit in there.
Maybe you already have a PDF to start with? If so, you are going to want to click the "Import" button (or "Import" dropdown then "PDF") to get those bullets loaded in. Right now, the tool can only handle imports from AF1206, AF707, AF910, and AF911 forms.
Once you upload a PDF, the tool will do a few things:
- Scoop out all of the bullets from the PDF and display them on the site
- Tweak the website text-area and display-area widths to match that of the imported PDF
There are two ways to save your file, described below. In both ways, your bullet text, abbreviation list, and other misc settings get saved for later use.
By clicking the Save button (or Save dropdown -> Cookie), you can save your progress to local browser storage. In order to resume progress later, you need to be using the same browser (i.e. chrome) on the same computer as before. You should not have to do anything else, the text will just be there next time you open the site.
By clicking the Save dropdown -> JSON, you can save your progress as a specially formatted text ("JSON") file onto your computer. If you need to work on a different computer, just take the file with you. Using the website on the new computer, click on the Import dropdown -> JSON and load in the JSON file that you saved before, and everything should get loaded in.
You can highlight words or phrases and do an instant thesaurus lookup for it. The thesaurus box is a drop down that you can toggle in the top menu. Click the plus sign next to any synonym to replace your current selection with it.
There is an abbreviations tab where you can type in words that you want abbreviated. You can also make your own comma separated list in excel excel sheet and import them in if you want. The application will do a case sensitive find-replace of all your abbreviations between the left and right text areas.
If you want, you can tweak the form width to something slightly smaller in the top menu. This will prevent the bullet text from being flush with the border. You can also do this to make the tool compatible with other forms that are currently not supported.