Some Neat Tricks
TABS
We told our pre-editors to take out all the tabs (see notes on Style – you don’t need tabs to indent your paragraphs, and you’re really much better off without them). We told you tabs break ebooks. But what if you’re not writing an ebook. What are tabs good for? Well…
- You can line up your decimal points with tabs, so they appear under each other.
- You can right-justify just the last piece of text on a line (say if you want headings that appear on the left and right).
- You can “tabulate” data (but if it’s going to be an ebook, use a table).
Here’s a brief example…
Left tab 936.51 center tab right tab
So left again 3.142 middle right
How do you do it? Click on the arrow at the bottom right of the “paragraph” block, then click on tabs (bottom left of the popup window), type in the location (in inches, measured from the left) of the tab you want, and select left, right, center, etc. Just play with them
UNBREAKABLE SPACES
When people type emails or use different word processors, they often create unexpected unbreakable spaces, which can cause very strange effects in ebooks and in laying out a regular print book (because the line can’t break at an unbreakable space). So we asked our pre-editors to take them out. But what are they useful for?
Suppose you don’t want any breaks between the words World War II… use Control Shift Spacebar to replace the spaces between World, War, and II. Then the phrase will always appear together on the line.
MANUAL LINE-BREAK
Manual line-breaks (shift enter) are useful for
- Adding a new line to a list entry
without adding a new entry (like this) - Writing poetry where every line doesn’t look like a new paragraph,
- And formatting right-justified text to avoid having a single word on the next line.
Be careful how you use them though. When you change the font size or convert your text to an ebook, you might not want a line break to
appear there.
The Things we asked you not to use
WHY NOT MAKE MY OWN (LONG) ELLIPSES?
Ellipses can be a series of three periods with or without spaces—long and short ellipses—so why not just go with them . . .? The reason is that Word will happily split your collection of periods, making one line end with two periods and the next start with one. Not at all the effect you were aiming for. Yes, it can be fixed. Yes, you can create and use your own long ellipses. But no, we don’t want to go to all the effort of making them work for you, so we ask you to use Word ellipses instead.
Create a Word ellipsis by typing three periods and a space. Easy.
WHY NOT USE STRAIGHT QUOTE MARKS?
Straight quote marks look like two small straight lines, or a single straight line, with no “curl” to it.
You can make them by typing a quote mark then hitting “undo,” and you can get rid of them by looking for ^034 and ^039. How do I know that? I asked Google.
Curly quotes look like those here, “undo,” and are different at the start and end of the word (but might not appear very different, depending on the font). In Times New Roman you have very clearly curly quotes with the ‘knob’ at the bottom left and top right.
Mixing straight and curly quotes just looks ‘odd’.
HOW TO FIND AND REMOVE STUFF THAT MESSES UP FORMATTING
Ask Google!
But here are some ‘codes’ that might help.
Tab ^t
Paragraph break ^p
manual line break ^l
Non-breaking space ^s
Ellipsis ^i
Straight quotes ^034
Straight single quote ^039
Emdash ^+
Endash ^=
Other Stuff
Capitalizing words
Just use the Aa button (next to the font size in the ribbon). It lets you capitalize the whole world, the first letter of every word, uncapitalize it all, ….
Don’t forget other good things (look in the same location) like superscriptsx and subscriptsy
Fancy Headings
Don’t forget there’s lots of good stuff available in Word Styles, besides the things we discussed last time.
- Click on the arrow at the bottom left of the Styles box
- Edit Style (bottom right-hand button)
- Modify>format> offers lots of very cool options
- Play with borders, frames, text effects, etc.
Headers and Footers
If you double-click in the top of bottom of the page, it will open the headers and footers for editing. Or click on Insert>Header or Footer.
- You can choose default styles,
- format the page numbers,
- set page numbers to start at a
particular section (see Starting Sections on Left-Facing Pages), and, of course, - use tabs to set a left and right
header. - Double-click back in the text to
return to normal editing.
If you choose to use Word Sections (highly recommended) you can even set headers that are different for each section, making it easy for readers to flip through the book to find things.
CHANGING MARGINS
Use the Layout tab. Margins and choose Custom Margins (bottom of the list) is really useful.
Don’t forget, if you’re creating a print book, you’ll want the page size to fit the size of the pages, the margins to be reasonable given the page size, and the ‘gutter’ to be big enough so the book can be opened without the text disappearing into the fold
When you set the gutter (same place as left and right margins), don’t forget to select ‘mirror margins’ so the wider space is to the right of a right-facing page and to the left of a left-facing page.\
Of course, the simplest way to create a book is to download a template for the appropriate size. Just ask Google where to find one – probably on Amazon.
STARTING SECTIONS ON LEFT-FACING PAGES
Use Layout>breaks>section break>odd page.
You’ll use this to
- avoid having page numbers on blank
pages - and to create new headers and footers
for new sections - for example, starting the page
numbers at the first entry rather than at the frontispiece.