FORMATTING HELL:

DANTE’S FIFTH CIRCLE

AMBER LOVE 14-FEB-2017 This content is supported financially by the generous backers at Patreon.com/amberunmasked. Join the monthly tip jar for first looks at my work.

STILL LEARNING AFTER THREE BOOKS!

I’ve taken three books from Scrivener and turned them into digital and printed final books. Somehow, I keep uncovering things. Maybe it’s from software upgrades or taking a stab at things that I previously let slide. Whichever. Doesn’t matter. I’m always hoping that the “fixes” I find will be ones that I’ll remember. Chances are I won’t. I go back to my tutorials and scribbled stenopads all the time.

STYLES MATTER FOR TABLE OF CONTENTS

I had already spent days working on Word styles. I thought I could define what went into the Table of Contents. I made the mistake of naming my formatted chapter titles “Chapter” but that doesn’t mean anything to Word. I had to go back through all of them and change my chapter titles to “Heading 1” and modify “Heading 1” to look like what I wanted. ToC programming will only read what you’ve formatted as Headings (and they are used to make outlines too).

WEIRD ASS APOSTROPHE PROBLEM

For some reason after formatting my text to my custom style “Body Paragraph” instead of “Normal” the Times New Roman font didn’t universally apply. I played around with the justification. I Googled to for help. I asked Twitter. The main suggestions were that Word was reading the text as a different language. That wasn’t it. Everything was set on English so turning off “automatically detect language” didn’t help either.

I saw a few people say that their documents were written in a font that they didn’t have installed. I thought, “No, that can’t be it. I’m using Times New Roman, ffs.” But it got me to take a closer look at the font defined in my custom style.

See in the window where it defines my font as Times New Roman, size 11? Well, I discovered that after that it also said Courier which is the default font of Scrivener. All I had to do was go up to the drop down menu right under Formatting and choose Times New Roman again and the Courier disappeared from the box below. I checked through my first four chapters and it looks like that resolved the issue!

WHY THE FIFTH CIRCLE OF HELL, AMBER?

If you’re like me and frequently hate software that won’t do what you want it to do, you may feel the outrage of the people from Office Space who hauled off on a printer with a baseball bat. I bet that feels real good.

The Fifth Circle of the Inferno has the Wrathful at the surface of the River Styx fighting each other; below are the Sullen sinking deeper into despair where they just can’t seem to figure out how the fuck to escape. As a person with severe depression and suicidal thoughts, I totally get those people and want to be their friend! Sometimes writing and publishing books makes me furious about why I can’t be better at it; other times I cave into the quagmire assuming I’m too worthless and too stupid to figure out how to do this job. Fifth Circle.

To see my other writing tips, there’s a Writing link in the tag cloud. Once you get through the paragraphs of sadness about my cat dying, I have a tutorial that gets people started in Scrivener with how I set up my windows and outline. The page I probably go back to the most is my page about Compiling in Scrivener.

Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.