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Help 2!

edited February 2017 in Writing
Just bumping this up as I'm getting desperate.

Okay: still going round the bend here. I'm trying to change the dropped caps at the beginnings of the chapters. Today I've cleared everything from the chapter title (underneath Chapter One etc) to a full line or more past the capital. The result is that all that text turns up in large bold letters on the Kindle previewer. The more text I delete, whether changed in Word doc or changed into RTF and put back, the more bold text appears.
Just for fun, a totally random line and a half midway through Ch 3 is turning up in bold too, and I haven't touched that.
The changes I've made to indents and to a couple of typos in the forematter have taken; this text is all in the body of the text, which is separated from the forematter by a break.
I've changed the indents after scene breaks, and they have worked all the way through. It's just the wretched drop caps that won't change successfully.
Losing the will to live here. Help! again.

Comments

  • edited February 2017
    How did you create the dropped caps in the paperback version? Whatever the method it's that which is causing the problem. Is the bold section new or was that in the original? And is it in both versions?

    The problem with the varying indents: how did you create your indents? If they were tabbed you will have issues.
  • edited February 2017
    The dropped caps were all done in Word - there's a 'Drop cap' button . The bold section is new - whenever I've changed the cap, either by deleting it alone, or the whole line, or the preceding five lines, or by going to the same Drop Cap button and choosing 'None', the changed parts are coming back in bold. In the Word version it all looks fine: it's the Kindle previewer that's showing the bold.

    The indents were all done as page layout, not tabbed. I've been able to change the ones after the section breaks by pressing the back arrow, with no problems in the kindle version.

    Whether the wandering indents are a knock-on from having written in Scrivener and then exported to Word, I don't know. The drop caps were added after I'd exported to Word.
  • Have you used any auto formatting functions such as headings or anything like that?
  • Is it possible to 'remove all formatting' or would it be too big a job to put it all back in? I used to get this sort of problem with old versions of Word because there would be so many 'echoes' of old formatting that had been changed,.the digital echo of these seem to remain and mucked things up. I don't get this nowadays with Word 365. I would solve it by getting rid of all formatting and then reformatting things that needed it - but that was easy with a poem. Or even 50 poems.

  • Whether the wandering indents are a knock-on from having written in Scrivener and then exported to Word, I don't know.
    Ah, did you just export and then start working, without clearing all formatting first?
  • edited February 2017
    I suspect Scrivener is at the root of all this. I have never worked on a client document that doesn't have problems when they have exported from Scrivener. However, I've always been able to solve them and without too much trouble. It's never been complicated and (unhelpfully) I can't suggest anything other than working your way through very, very carefully.

    The apostrophes are straight and that's a Scrivener issue – they're at odds with the serif font. You only need to 'select all' and then 'replace all' to correct them. But you would need to ensure none were 'turned' – that's not easy to spot when they're straight.
  • Is it possible to 'remove all formatting'
    It's possible - and strongly advised.
  • edited February 2017
    Yep. Take it all out. I don't use any formatting in my books. Just Word's standard tools.

    The Scrivener usage possibly explains the hyphen-en dash problem.
  • I've left the drop caps in place, but tidied up the distance between them and the rest of the word; according to the preview, they all look as though they're in the right place in relation to the line, whereas before they seemed to sit too low. I've done the typo corrections and formatting to the front matter, which was written in Word, not Scrivener; and I've removed indents after all scene breaks. The whole looks fine now, or as fine as I can get it while holding onto my sanity. I'm not playing with it any more. I will, however, remember all of this for the next one. And I am never, ever using drop caps again for anything other than a paperback novel.

    If I'd done the Kindle version first, I (probably) wouldn't have had this problem.

    Yes, I think it was changing font in Word from a Scrivener document export that caused the dash problem.

    I'm all computered out now. Even Mr Bear, the resident techie and all-round (not to mention all round) computer go-to man has had enough.
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