Spacing is inconsistent

[notthatamanda]

I've got one chapter where the characters texts are not spacing out between each one.

Should look like this:

Hi

Hi

What you doing

Nothing

Instead it looks like this:

Hi
Hi
What you doing
Nothing

The maddening thing is it is working fine most everywhere else. I've selected the text and cleared all formatting, then reformatted it using my text style. It works in some spots not in others.  Ideas?

Rant: I like writing, I don't mind editing, formatting can go suck an egg. A big rotten one.

Thanks.

[TimothyEllis]

Grab the whole chapter, and copy it to a basic text editor.

Delete the chapter.

Copy it back, highlight, and hit the style button.

If it came from somewhere else, there could be a lot of embedded font and formatting changes in there you can't see, and trying to delete them never works.

By copying to a text editor like Notepad, all the formatting is removed. By deleting the entire chapter, you also delete all the formatting around the damaged area. When you copy back it has none (unless affected by what was in the previous chapter), so hitting the style button should set it right.

[notthatamanda]

Thanks, I was thinking that a more complete nuking of the formatting was in order. Will try it later.

[TimothyEllis]

The other thing I have done a few times over the years is to open a completely new document, copy the text in, and then redo the formatting from scratch.

Sometimes a document is so badly damaged it can't be fixed. So cut and paste into a completely new doc, solves all problems.

[notthatamanda]

I should really learn my lesson and just do that. I waste a lot of time trying to avoid it. Off to see if nuking the one chapter alone will work.

Edit - Nuking the chapter didn't work.  Too deeply embedded I guess. Weird. But I am afraid if I strip the whole document I'll miss the italics I put in for the emphasis and thoughts. I'm playing with right justifying the texts so they go back and forth. Just thinking in my fingers here.  Thank you for your help.

[Gessert Books]

Alternating right/left justification will likely break as soon as a reader touches their justification settings at the device, unfortunately. A thought: if two characters were having a rapid-fire conversation, their comments wouldn't be set off any differently than any other paragraph, so perhaps this isn't so bad?

Flipside: if you set each one as a blockquote, it will probably convert with space above and below. You'd just have to avoid setting it as one huge blockquote, they'd have to be several distinct ones. Take this one with a grain of salt as I don't format using Word; my comments are based on what I've seen as I format FROM Word.

[notthatamanda]

Good point. I only did one section of the rapid fire text, I'll sleep on it and change my mind about 1000 times again.
Edit - maybe I'll just use a slightly different font for each character. Thank god I didn't make any group chats.
Edit again - maybe use indent instead of justifying.

[Gessert Books]

Re: alternating font--I wondered if alternating italics might work, and be a little easier to accomplish.

[notthatamanda]

Eh, I appreciate the suggestion, but we went with a sans serif font for the text to look more text-y. I think a bigger indent is what I will try next. I just don't want readers to get confused in the short rapid fire text sequences.

[notthatamanda]

The bigger indent looked perfect in Word and didn't do anything once it went through the meatgrinder to make the epub.  I'm going to leave it. I hope it doesn't confuse people but it is an unputdownable thriller with several shocking twists so I am trying to confuse the readers most of the time anyway. Thanks for trying to help everyone.

[notthatamanda]

I had it all set, copied the word file to make the D2D version, uploaded to D2D, noticed some of the text formatting vanished. All I did was copy the file and changes the links in the back matter to my Books2Read links. That's all I did. Why the hell would some of the formatting vanish from the middle of the book?  Now I have to go back and double check the Amazon file and the Kobo file AGAIN.

 

Shoot me, somebody please.

[notthatamanda]

Oh it's worse. Much worse. I had the print file all set. I copied that file into a master ebook file and started formatting for the ebook. It was fine, now in addition to some of the san serif bold fonts that disappeared, some if not all of the italics for emphasis and thought are gone.  It's just crazy. I have to go through the entire book again. I don't know if the big update windows did this week could have caused this but it's a giant mess.