Formatting your book with OpenOffice
From author Lianne Simon via Self-Publishing Review:
Although I’ve got a great publisher for the e-book edition of Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite, I decided to self-publish the paperback. Since I was already familiar with OpenOffice and unable to afford Adobe InDesign, I decided to invest some time to see if using OpenOffice was feasible.
. . . .
Editing always seems to inject typographic and formatting errors. So my first step was to insure that I didn’t have any tabs, double spaces, extra hard returns, or other debris in my file. What remained was the standard 12-point Times Roman, letter size, one inch margins, double-spaced document that we all use when we send a manuscript to an agent.
. . . .
I use paragraph styles in my documents, but sometimes editing results in blocks of text that are ‘confused’ about their style. My first step, then was to re-assert a generic paragraph formatting everywhere.
I checked the ‘Text body’ paragraph style to make sure the paragraph indent was set to a reasonable initial value. You can bring up the Styles and Formatting by selecting it in the Format menu or by pressing F11. Don’t use the formatting in the toolbar.
. . . .
Since I use the ‘Text body’ paragraph style for my body text, I selected the entire document and applied the ‘Text body’ paragraph style by double-clicking on ‘Text body’ in the list of paragraph styles. Once again, don’t change the format using the toolbar. I hate this step because it removes all of the styling I did before sending the document off to agents.
Link to the rest at Self-Publishing Review
There is lots more that adds up to a step-by-step formatting recipe for a POD book.
A couple of Passive Guy tips:
1. PG uses OpenOffice Writer to clean up a few different issues with Word. Sometimes, if you have formatting problems you can’t seem to fix with Word, a trip through OpenOffice can clean them up.
2. Even if you’re not going to use CreateSpace for your POD, the CreateSpace interior templates can save you a lot of time because they come ready to go with left page and right page formatting, alternating author and title headers, reasonably-spaced chapter first pages, page numbering that starts with Chapter 1 and a good collection of basic styles applicable for indie POD work.
When PG is putting together a POD interior file, he begins with a CreateSpace template he’s modified to work the way he wants it to work.
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In 2009 I formatted a book for Lightning Source in Open Office. A couple years later I switched to Word. It’s a superior word processing program for a writer–for a scientist or business person I’m sure OO’s great. Over the past two weeks I formatted 3 books for CreateSpace. I started where the original documents were–Word, and ran into problems with the first book. Trip back to OO. So yes, OO can be the go-to guy with problems in formatting. But with the last book I wanted to try Drop Caps. OO absolutely refused to do Chapters 3 and 8. I went back to Word and it handled it beautifully, so simply. (Look under Design)
All last week I did blogposts detailing this journey as well as specifics on building the covers. Here’s the one primarily on formatting. http://robinoneillebooks.blogspot.com/2012/02/createspace-without-angst.html
My Mileage Varied so I disagree that using CreateSpace provided interior templates is easier or better. Being unable to change the page numbers was only the beginning of my hassle with their template and their support couldn’t answer my questions. Making my own was so much easier.
The left right page business is immediately handled in Word by using Mirror layout. Look for it under Margins. If you go to page layout and type in what size book you’re creating, you are exactly at the same place as a CreateSpace template WITHOUT their hidden coding which can be a witch to get around. Headers and footers are automatically there–you just don’t see them. Start the text 2″ down.
OO is a simpler procedure for exporting to PDF, though. (It’s called printing in Word.)
Obviously I’m with you, PG, use both. You never know which one will do what you need to get done. But I have to say after 3 books this month I’m exceedingly impressed with Word and you have no idea how hard it is for me to praise Microscoff products.
I have to beat Word regularly (and getting a new version is something I do not intend to do for as long as possible, because fixing their dadgum autocorrect is always a pain and a half), and I still use it for most stuff. *sigh*
Thanks for all the tips, Barbara.
I do the same exact thing, PG. Using both helps me find what WORD does not. And I have a standard set of searches I do at the end to eliminate user error (well…can’t really eliminate, my editor does that)
Splitter
I used OOo for a long time but switched to LibreOffice after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (that organized the open source coding teams). LibreOffice is self managed now and making very impressive progress.
I helped a local author format his book for Createspace and his Word document was a mess. I fixed it with LibreOffice and put it in Createspace’s template for him. He’s now running LibreOffice and happy for his next projects.
My own books I’m selling only electronically and use LibreOffice the whole way. I’ve even resurrected old Word files from the 1990′s and brought them in to finish on LibreOffice. It works great and costs ‘write’
I need to try LibreOffice sometime, JS.
I left this comment on the original article, but I’ll repeat it here for the benefit of readers here:
You might want to try LibreOffice http://www.libreoffice.org/) instead. This is a fork of OpenOffice with more active development and bug fixes. Long story, but when Oracle bought Sun they mismanaged it, and all the key developers moved to LibreOffice. Freed of corporate oversight they were able to clean up years of backlogged bugs in a few months, so LibreOffice is now a far better product.
Another vote noted for LibreOffice.
I know I’ll use OpenOffice to convert a Word doc, but it always introduces horrendous formatting errors if I dare save it to a native format. Basically, I pull the Word .rtf, open it in OpenOffice, correct the weird things OO did to my centered lines, do. not. save. it. (or those will be reintroduced and more besides), and export to .html, which I can then convert through Calibre to a gorgeous .mobi with pictures.
Thanks for that tip, Megan.
Non vote for Libre Office. I downloaded it thinking it was newer and spiffier but switched back to OO when I couldn’t get the results I needed.
How long ago was that? The development has been proceeding very fast. I installed 3.4.4 in November, and it’s already up to 3.5.0. But with all the changes they’ve made, it’s quite possible they broke some things along the way (that’s the nature of software). If you found any specific bugs you might want to report them (if they haven’t been already), and try it again in a few months.
Incidentally, both can be installed side by side, and documents are compatible between them since they both use the Open Document Format (http://opendocumentformat.org/) natively. But as usual, keep backup copies if you’re not sure.
LyX – Free and will give you output every bit as good as InDesign. I’ve never tried setting it up on windows so I can’t speak to how easy that is. Should be an easy choice for Linux users.
Looks interesting. I’ve been meaning to investigate whether LaTeX could generate the different e-book formats from a single master document, and LyX could be a good way to work with LaTeX. When I read about having to nuke all the formatting in a document and reapply chapter titles and so on, or having to maintain different versions of a document for different targets, it strikes me that there is something wrong with the tools.