Tips and Tricks of the Trade
These articles are to aid writers who do not wish to
pay a formatter, or would rather have a much smaller formatting fee, or who
need a fast turnaround (badly formatted manuscripts take longer and are
sometimes moved down the work-pile).
In this first article, all of which are for Microsoft
Word users, we will remove “bloat” from the Word document – Word harbors
invisible, hidden HTML which can show up after a conversion; especially in
Kindle mobi files.
Other bloat examples are headers, footers, and page
numbers, which can play havoc with epub pages; and also background shading,
which one gets if pasting from the internet (the background is invisible in
Word but shows up if e-readers opt to read in Sepia or Midnight mode).
We also want to remove any bookmarks, most of which
are hidden, because they compromise epubcheck if they are left in and we auto-generate
an active Table of Contents or want to make one using bookmarks (more about
that later in the series).
Getting rid of all these examples of bloat, in one
fell swoop, is quite easy to do – but always save the document under a new name
first in case things go wrong.
So, with your document open, left-click on the File
tab (top left) and select “Save As” which takes you to your document folder. Rename
the document by adding #1 to the file name (next time it can be #2) and your
original document is unchanged.
Firstly, if you have been using “Track Changes” with
an editor, etc. click the “Review” tab and select “Accept All Changes In
Document” and also “Delete All Comments In Document”. Remember, you still have these changes and
comments in the original document, so no need to worry about losing them as
long as you have saved the document under a new name as above.
Next thing you need to do is open Wordpad, which is a
basic RTF document template. If you can’t find it, click on the Windows logo at
the bottom left of your desktop screen and type WORDPAD into the “Search
programs and files” field and it will come up under the heading “Programs”.
Left-click and a Wordpad page comes up. If it’s not there just google: FREE
WORDPAD DOWNLOAD and install it on your PC.
The next step (with your newly saved Word document and
Wordpad both open) is to soft-nuke the Word doc via Wordpad:
·
Click on your Word document and press the keys Ctrl
and A which will select all the content in the Word document.
·
Press the keys Ctrl and C which will copy all the
content you just selected.
·
Go to the open Wordpad document and press the keys
Ctrl and V which will paste all the content into Wordpad.
·
Now press Ctrl and A to select all the content that is
now in Wordpad.
·
Press Ctrl and C to copy all the content you just
selected.
·
Open a new Word document and press Ctrl and V to paste
all the content into the new Word document.
·
Save the new document (you can name it as your
original and add #2 or some other identifier).
You will not lose bold,
italic or underline text,
unlike when you nuke a file using Notepad.
You do not need to save the Wordpad document, which is
just part of the bloat-rinsing process.
This new document will be the one we tidy up further
in the next stage of the process, which will be explained in the next article: Tidying up Ellipses
Thank you for reading this article.
