MS Word styles and typography

Two versions of page 1. Margins not accurate

First thing--yes, I did finish the editing. All the chapters are done, and I added a few items I realized might need for the sequel. So the interior body of the book is pretty much done.

I also worked on the front matter, specifically the copyright page. I looked at many fiction books and studied their disclaimers, then created my own. I also worked on the dedication page. There is still work to do on the back material (author info and acknowledgments).

But the big issues this week were "styles" and typography.

Have you ever used "styles" in MS Word? I never had. I did know that over the years Word had sometimes driven me absolutely crazy because I would try to change some formatting (say line spacing from single- to double-spaced) and IT WOULDN'T LET ME. Or it added extra space after paragraphs that I DIDN'T WANT AND IT WOULDN'T GO AWAY! Aarghhh!

But now I know why.

Think of using a typewriter. When you type with a typewriter, certain formatting decisions have been made for you. You have a certain font of a certain size. This is just the way it is.

Well, when you open a new document in Word, certain formatting decisions have also been made for you, because whoever created Word wanted you to be able to start typing without picking a font or the font size. They also picked the line spacing and paragraph formatting. Then they put all these formatting decisions together and called it a STYLE.

You may not know it's there. I sure didn't. (I never learned Word formally.) But if you try to change it by using the obviously visible formatting controls, you will have problems. You will get frustrated and want to send scathing letters to Microsoft. But all you really need to do is learn about STYLES.

I won't go into all the details, but other people have. I found this page and this page instructive.

So what's the point of all this style business? I see two main ones. The first is understanding how to manipulate MS Word so you don't get frustrated with it. The second is that it saves time! Using styles, I can change the font for the body of all my chapters with a single formatting change and not have to change each chapter separately (which I would have to do otherwise since I'm using a different chapter title font.)

So. Styles, my "eureka" moment of the week. I might be the last person to come to this party, but I'm glad I got here.

So what else did I do this week? I changed the font, the font size, and the line spacing.

What?!? Why? Well, I actually printed out some sample pages, cut them down to size, and saw how they looked. Frankly, the font looked too big and also too light.

If you look at the image above, this original version is on the left: Garamond 14/16, i.e. 14 pt with 16 pt leading. Too big. Too light.

When I realized that Garamond looked too light, I tried out several other fonts that were installed on my computer. Fonts like Palatino (nice, but bad quotation marks), Bookman Old Style (okay...), Baskerville Old Face and Big Caslon (didn't like their spacing), Goudy Old Style (nice, but also light)--well, it went on and on. I really wanted Garamond, truth to tell, if only it were darker.

So I did some research and found that there are various versions of Garamond. Then I did some poking around on my computer and discovered a folder on my hard drive with a bunch of fonts that had never been installed. One of them was Adobe Garamond. Yippee!

I managed to download it and (after an anxious time when it wasn't showing up in Word until I restarted the computer) tried it out. It looked good, it printed out darker, and it also had not only the regular font but Adobe Garamond Italics, Adobe Garamond Bold, Adobe Garamond SemiboldItalic, Adobe Garamond SaucyBold (not really), in other words, the whole package. This is important, because when using italics it is much preferable to use an actual designed italic font, rather than just pressing the "italics" button on the computer.

Then I played around with font sizes. Twelve was so small, it really shrank my book. I'm aiming at about 200 pages, and 12 pt took it way down to 170 or so. Not good. So I tried 13 pt, along with increasing the leading and expanding the margins slightly, and what I ended up with was smaller, darker, nicer looking, and about the same total number of pages as when it was 14 pt. Success!  You can see what it looks like in comparison on the right above: Adobe Garamond 13/17. (Also, I changed the chapter titles to Casablanca Antiqua, my probable title font, instead of Garamond.)

I could go on and on about how I then changed all my italics from faux italics to the italics font and moved the chapter title up on the page a bit and REDID ALL THE WIDOWS AND ORPHANS (yes) and changed the size of the decorative elements around the chapter numbers... but I'm sure I've put most of you to sleep by now.

For this week: I feel that I am getting dangerously near to being ready to upload my interior files to CreateSpace, which means that I'll have to make the ISBN decision soon and finalize the front and back material. I may also play around with different cover images. Stay tuned...