I’ve already mentioned Styles, and I will again today, as I go through a couple of very practical tips for formatting in Word, starting with an invaluable one. As I mentioned before, a number of e-book conversion programmes have real problems with some forms of manual formatting, so my number one tip, before you do anything else, is turn on the paragraph marks (On the home tab, the one that looks like a backwards ‘P’ in bold) to see where you have carriage returns in, and where you’ve used the tab key to indent a paragraph (an arrow). Before you try anything that follows save a copy with a different filename!!! Always have a backup in case anything goes wrong.
For “styles”, if you don’t want to mess with the default options, or want make remembering what you’re using more easily, create your own. You do this, full screen, on the “home” tab, clicking the down arrow next to the Styles block, and click “create a style”. Name it whatever you want (for my latest book I use four which I call “maintext” “Chapter” “subtitle” and “phone texts”). Once created you can modify to be anything you like, and apply to similar blocks of text. One tip though, if you’re creating (or modifying) a “Chapter” one one of the main boxes you’ll see if called “based on” and by default this will be “normal”. Change this to one of the “headings” styles. You can still amend size, font etc however you like, but when you come to auto-creating a table of contents, Word does this based on the “Headings” categories, so make sure your chosen “style” is based on one of those. I hope that makes sense.
Now (having saved a backup) get rid of all these manual indents. I know, that sounds like a huge job but highlight and copy that arrow showing an indent to your clipboard, select “replace” on the home tab and paste it into the “find what” box and click “replace all”. Magic, they’re gone. Now right click on the style you’re using for your main text (click the link on my last post to see how to create your own in more detail if you need), select modify, and then at the bottom where it says “format” choose “paragraph” from the drop down. Now, on “indentation” where it says “special”, click the drop down and select “first line”, and choose the indent you need (for an A4 version I do 0.6cm). You now have automatic indents at the beginning of a paragraph. If it doesn’t apply straight away, select your text and click the Style you’ve modified and that will force the changes. Wherever you see the backward ‘P’ you have a manual return, check if they’re accidental. If at any point you want to hide these marks again, just click on the backwards ‘P’ at the top in the home tab again.
The second basic thing you need to do, which will save you a lot of grief both with formatting, and when you need to change sizes for a paperback, instead of lots of hard returns, when you reach the end of a chapter, go to the “insert” menu and put in a “page break”. The next chapter (or following text) now starts on a new page. If you add these accidentally, click on the backwards ‘P’ again and they’ll show up.
These hidden codes tweaks are a Godsend for changing formatting. And you’ll thank me when I come to making paperback and e-book versions, and even converting to pdf.
I mentioned in a previous post that you’ll want different tables of contents for different formats, and the same will go for page numbering, which only really applies to your Word and paperback versions, but Word can be an absolute swine in letting you only start the actual numbering. Never fear, I found a brilliant guide for this.
Here’s an invaluable link I found when looking at the page numbering of my own manuscript, from Cleveland State University. One of the banes of my life is sorting pages where you don’t want the first blank pages to be numbered, and want to start the process afresh with p1 on the first chapter. This shows you how to do it easily.
I don’t want to add to much to each post, as I know its complicated, but these tips will really help when I come to post about converting and resizing for papaerbacks.
Stay safe,
Kit