Use Styles in Your Manuscript Now or Pay the Price Later
Another wise person, Joel Friedlander, tells you how to apply styles to make your manuscript into a book without blowing away all your local formatting.
What’s local formatting? All the words you italicized when you wrote your manuscript. You know how you do that. Block the word and hit the italics button. There are other examples, but PG has italics burned into his brain right now.
Passive Guy wishes he had read Joel’s advice before he formatted Mrs. PG’s latest backlist book. He discovered a longer way to accomplish what Joel shows you how to do in a shorter and slicker way:
There’s one problem moving long documents from a word processor file to a page layout program that has the potential to drive you nuts.
How do you deal with local formatting?
Okay, you need to understand exactly what I’m talking about. When we say local formatting, we’re talking about all the times you typed, let’s say, the title of a book. You then went back, selected the text and made it italic.
You know book titles have to be in italic, you congratulate yourself and off you go to your next chore. Good job!
Well, it’s a good job until it comes time to put your file into your page layout program. I’m using Adobe InDesign, so that’s the one I’m going to talk about.
. . . .
Now you dump your file into InDesign. Of course, it doesn’t look right, the typeface is wrong since InDesign by default will try to keep the formatting in your file intact.
. . . .
Your italic is intact, but everything else is wrong. What are your strategies now?
1. You can click in each paragraph and select the Paragraph Style you’ve set up in InDesign. This will take quite a while and won’t solve all your problems.
2. Instead of placing the file in InDesign, you can copy and paste it from your Word document. You will lose all your local formatting. That won’t be fun.
3. You can use the “clear formatting” button located on the bottom of the Paragraph Styles palette (more on this in a minute). You can Cmd-Click in each paragraph to clear only the character-level formatting. That will eliminate your italic too.
. . . .
I’ve talked before about using styles instead of formatting, and here you’ll see another example of why you need to make this a habit.
Let’s step through it together. For the sake of this example I’m going to imagine that this book has lots of italic in it, but no bold and no superscript. That is, italic is the only local formatting we have to deal with here.
1. Place the file into your InDesign document.
2. Find/Change using InDesign’s search and replace function. Search for any instance of italic, and replace it with your new text italic character style.
3. Select All to select all the text in your publication.
4. Clear Formatting by using that handy clear formatting button we just looked at.
Link to the rest at The Book Designer
Passive Guy thinks you can do this with a recent version of Word as well, but he hasn’t tried it in exactly the way Joe recommends.
No, PG is not in the mood to try it right now. He has seen way more styles in the past couple of days than any human being should be required to see.
Most interesting. I know Styles to some degree (in the tech manuals I used to write I used it for headings and hyperlinks and such) but it hadn’t occurred to me to use it for simple italics. I’m curious as well whether there’s a difference if you highlight a word and click on the hand “I” button, or if you do Ctl I to start/finish the italics. Also, I always make an em dash by holding down the alt key and typing 0151, instead of doing that dash dash and pray it’s right thing. I wonder if that messes things up or if InDesign knows ASCII (which is what that code is, I think).
Kat – Every time I think I have the secret sauce for styles, I hit another speed bump. (metaphor mix noted)
Word calls the way most people do italics “direct formatting.”
Whether direct formatting is overridden by a style or not depends on how much there is in a paragraph.
If you apply a style to a paragraph, and less than half the text in the paragraph has direct formatting, then Word retains the direct formatting.
If you apply a style to a paragraph, and more than half the text in the paragraph has direct formatting, then the style overrides the direct formatting.
What could be easier to deal with when you’re formatting a whole book?
every time I read one of Joel’s blog entries, I end up thinking “clearly, the answer is to hire Joel.”
I don’t even want to attempt formatting endnotes in efiles.
Maril – I have the distinct impression that working with Joel on a book would be a true pleasure.
Having just finished formatting one of Mrs. PG’s backlist books yesterday and starting on another one today, thoughts of having Joel handle all of these issues are extremely tempting.
PG, I have no idea how you do it, but just when I have a challenge, whether it be formatting or anything else, you post something that deals directly with that issue. You have been doing this consistently for a solid two weeks now, btw!
I just got the Adobe Creative Master Suite that has In Design and I had NO clue how to use it. This definitely helps, since I am a WordPerfect devotee. Thank you for that.
I’m glad this was helpful, Francoise, but credit goes to Joel for sharing his expertise.
Styles are fully integrated into Word, yes. Actually, they’re fully integrated into Open Office Writer, too (and, if you’ve already dumped O.O for Libre Office, you’ll find them there as well).
I think the trick to using styles is to avoid not using them, whenever possible.
I mean, rather than mixing direct formatting and styles – if you can, just use styles. There’s going to be come little spots you need direct tweaks, but in general? Stick to styles. Once you have them all set up the way you want, they’re DONE – you don’t need to mess with them for future work.
I think the trick is to use as little formating as possible in the manuscript and then also to be consistent with it.