Format MS Word doc to look like a book question

You have to full-justify the right-hand side of the page. I guess your left side is full-justified and your right side is not.

I guess it all depends on what size you want your book to be. Have you considered pasting your 8.5x11 manuscript into a template of the size you want your book to be, say 6x9? That's what I do. I really hope I'm helping you here.

Justification is paragraph-based formatting, not document-based, so page setup is not where you need to address this. [Vertical alignment is where the text sits compared to the TOP and BOTTOM of the page, not left and right.]

If your entire document needs to be justified, simply go Ctrl-A and Ctrl-J and it's done.

However, most people centre their headings, so you have three options:

Option 1.

If you've used a different style for your headings and the body of your document, modify the style you've used on the body of your document so that it's justified. Chances are you haven't though.

Option 2.

Select each section of text you wish to justify and hit Ctrl-J (or click the "Justify" button on your toolbars). Rather laborious, but your main option if you haven't used styles.

Option 3.

Select your entire document (Ctrl-A) and justify it (Ctrl-J). Then go through and fix each heading by placing your cursor on the heading and centring (Ctrl-E).

I thoroughly recommend reading through the style help section in your MS Word Help options. Word has quite reasonable help sections for many basic functions. Then, next time you start a book/story, set up your styles first. Makes adjustments much easier.

Formatting MS Word

Totally agree with previous comment about using WORD Styles for formatting. There are tutorials on the web to learn about it.

However: you can run into a problem in MS WORD with justifying -- especially if you've put in "hard" carriage returns where they don't belong and/or are using long words or web citations without doing hyphenation. Even without those, you can get white "rivers" on a page as the program shifts words to make them justified. The only way to fix rivers is to go in on a line, or even a few words basis and microadjust character and word spacing. You can do the character spacing in WORD, but it doesn't understand microadjusting on a single line.

A poster on Createspace has a book available on formatting: http://www.12on14.com/pages/createspace.htm . Build Your Book, It's free and has good advice. There was also a lengthy discussion there about other issues that make a book just "look" self-published -- like having widow/orphan control turned on.

Good luck with it. It's not as easy as it looks. And, frankly, I would never use WORD to do the pre-pdf setup.

Jean

Look the manuscript over carefully. Right justifying in word often leave big empty spaces because Word isn't able to use kerning.

Word is a wonderful tool, but many programs do a much better job at turning a manuscript into a book.

^ Word does have the ability to use kerning for fonts. Possibly other products do a superior job, though.

kurzon said:

^ Word does have the ability to use kerning for fonts. Possibly other products do a superior job, though.

Click to expand...

If you want to call it kerning. It really isn't, and looks horrible.

kurzon said:

^ Word does have the ability to use kerning for fonts. Possibly other products do a superior job, though.

Click to expand...

Not it really doesn't. It absolutely can not do kerning. The "full justification" is not using kerning; it doesn't even use kerning tables.

To refer to that as kerning is like calling margarine butter.

COOLORANGEFREEZE said:

To accomplish kerning (older Word programs) - Format/Font/Character Spacing/Spacing/Expanded or Condensed.

Click to expand...

That isn't kerning; it isn't even using kerning tables; what it is doing is adjusting the point size of spaces.

Not Kerning.

COOLORANGEFREEZE said:

To accomplish kerning (older Word programs) - Format/Font/Character Spacing/Spacing/Expanded or Condensed

Click to expand...

It should be: Format/Font/Character Spacing/Kerning for Fonts