I hate MS Word. When you're dealing with documents larger than, oh, ten pages, Word gets unruly. You make changes in one part of the document, and a totally unrelated part of the document decides to shift itself—usually some part waaaaay back in the document, near the beginning, that you thought had been formatted to your satisfaction. Then you get to the point where you want to save your document as a PDF, so you do that, thinking all is well. And as you're reviewing the PDF, you see the fucking dirty thing Word had done, waaaaay back in the document. So you go Fuck! and return to your MS Word document and start combing through it from the beginning, once again ironing out the kinks. And something else goes wrong as you're working, so you have to stop and repair that. Eventually, you get everything where you want it (or so you think, so you hope), and you make another PDF. By this point, hours have passed—just you, getting visibly older and fatter as you hunch over your computer screen, trying to bang out this goddamn document that should have been done half a day ago.
All of the above to say that I think I've finally got a decent, updated version of my book contents uploaded, so anyone who wants to order a hard copy should give it a try.
Fuck. I'm going to bed. But I can't sleep: I'm too stressed out.
Bestiality porn, here I come. O sheepie, give me solace and comfort.
I can totally relate. Sometimes you use the paint function to copy formatting over and for whatever reason it doesn't look the same. Btw, are you using styles? That's the easiest way to get things uniform over a long document.
ReplyDeleteI don't generally use styles, but that's not because I object to them—I simply rarely use them. I have a deep mistrust of anything that's supposed to apply across an entire document. That said, I do use styles when creating a Kindle ebook document because that's the only way to create a table of contents that has links to chapter titles. The "styles" function sounds like something to look into more deeply, though, from what you're saying. I'll look into it, but I don't know whether it will solve the kinds of problems I've been having, which are mainly of the paragraph-formatting variety.
DeleteDo styles help with things like widows and orphans at the bottoms and tops of pages? Do styles make the top and bottom lines of text across two facing pages look even? If so, that would solve a lot of problems. The text in my book has this mild unevenness that makes the overall design look slightly unprofessional. I'm thinking a good solution might be to switch to a different (and hopefully better) word processor.
I can't say I've ever noticed a problem with widows and orphans. It always seems to push them down automatically. There is a box you can tick in the line and page breaks tab of the paragraph formatting section. You can set different styles to have different fonts, indentation, bold, all-caps, etc. etc. I mainly use it when translating Kdrama scripts that need to be formatted Hollywood-style with different levels of line spacing and indentation depending on whether it's scene headings, character names, exposition, dialogue, stage directions etc. etc. It definitely ensures that all text with a certain style applied, is uniform.
DeleteI just found an MS Word function called "vertical alignment" for text. It sounded like the direct solution to my problems. You can select "top," "bottom"(!), "center," or "justify" for your alignment. I tried it, but it, too, created difficulties. Part of the problem is the way the function vertically aligns text: by creating uneven spaces between paragraphs. And still, on some pages, the program refuses to align text flush with the top and bottom of the printable area. Frustrating.
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