Italics and spacing

Sarahrizz

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Hello Everyone,

I know this is likely a dumb question, but I recently had my story draft read by a family member, and they pointed out something that I thought I'd get a second opinion on.

In my work I use Italics at certain parts. But when I do the word after the italics looks like it has no space between it and the italicized portion. Like this. Now, I've read a number of docs with italicized portions like this and I still read it as two words, but this confused my family member and they highlighted it all like it was a grammatical mistake. Have any of you found this issue, and what have you done? Should I just ignore the point? Should I add a double space there, or try changing the font so maybe it looks better?

Thank you all for helping with my dumb questions. You are a very helpful community.
 

lizmonster

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Are you sure there is a space there? I've noticed when I export from Scrivener to Word sometimes the spaces after my italicized words get swallowed.

If you're sure there's a space, I'd play with the font, or the font size rather than add two spaces.
 

fenyo

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well, I will give you a dumb answer.

I hate italics!

I don't know what they mean. if a sentence say: "she had a beautiful shirt", dose it mean she had a beautiful shirt or she didn't had a beautiful shirt. I don't get it.

I hate italics!:rant:
 
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Sarahrizz

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Most of the time I use them in dialogue when a character verbally highlights a word, or says that word differently. "The book," is read differently than "The book" for instance.

I wrote my story in Libre Office Writer, then exported it in PDF so she could use her Kindle to read it. I've checked my doc and it does have a space between the words. PDF's are hard to check but it looks like there's a space there to me.
 

lizmonster

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I wrote my story in Libre Office Writer, then exported it in PDF so she could use her Kindle to read it. I've checked my doc and it does have a space between the words. PDF's are hard to check but it looks like there's a space there to me.

In your situation I'd try bumping the font size. Can Libre Office export it to .mobi? That way your family member could fiddle with the font themselves.
 

fenyo

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Most of the time I use them in dialogue when a character verbally highlights a word, or says that word differently. "The book," is read differently than "The book" for instance.

that is exactly my point, it is not clear how is it read, it's like guessing.
 

Bing Z

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I wrote my story in Libre Office Writer, then exported it in PDF so she could use her Kindle to read it. I've checked my doc and it does have a space between the words. PDF's are hard to check but it looks like there's a space there to me.

A bit OT ^_^

I regularly export my word documents to Kindle. PDF is a bad format for Kindle. If you have to do it regularly, consider using/installing Amazon's SendtoKindle app, which will convert the doc format to kindle format during the process (and thus the MS reads like a real ebook.) It may or may not convert ODF format, but LibreOffice can 'save as' doc/docx anyway.
 

AW Admin

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Turn on non printing characters in Libre Office via the View menu. Spaces will be shown as a small light dot slightly above the baseline of the text.

Are you using a mono spaced font (like Courier) where every character takes up exactly the same space, or a proportionately spaced font like Times New Roman or Bookman or Palatino or Georgia where each character has its own amount of space?

Are the spaces set in italics ?
 

Maryn

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I've had something similar pointed out to me in critique of paper copy. It makes a substantial difference whether the spaces before and after the word are also in italics or if they're in the normal font. The size of the font matters, too. When I print in 16 or 18 for my visually impaired friend, it's not as bad as in the 12 everybody else gets.

I experimented, copying a few of the offending lines to their own document, Times New Roman 12, and printing it using Word 2016, Libre Office, and Open Office. (It was probably fun for anyone watching me go to various machines to do this.) All looked identical, so it's not Libre Office's shortcoming.

IMO, it's at its worst when the last italicized letter is tall with stuff at its right, like f, t, and d. I find the f in particular feels close, even when there's definitely a space there.

I will also get on the bandwagon for minimizing italics for emphasis, trusting the reader to get it right and realizing it doesn't matter if they hear the line the way you do. (It took years to break myself of this, for the record.) I save its use for emphasis only if the meaning of the sentence changes without italics.

Maryn, old dog with a new trick of fewer italics