HateHATEHATEhateALSOHATE

[ursulav]

I have a shiny edited file of the Goblin novella in my hot little hand.

I am trying to format it for self-pub.

I HATE EVERYTHING THAT HAS EVER LIVED AND I’M NOT FEELING GREAT ABOUT FUTURE GENERATIONS EITHER

I stripped everything out in a text editor and then Kevin said “Hey, you can do that much easier in Scrivener and it will compile it to ePub”

Comments

[mmegaera]

Much sympathy. One good thing about going through this is that you do learn what to do while you're actually writing (styles, anyone?) that will make it much easier the next go round.

[skellington1]

Except that styles in word are SUCH a pain.

(Graphic design snob. After learning document formatting in InDesign, word makes me want to pull my hair out and run screaming through the streets).

[3rdragon]

If you need company in that, let me know. (I was messing with a Word table of contents the other day . . .)

[t_c_da]

I've never used InDesign (or any other Adobe product than Acrobat - employer provided) so I have nothing to compare with, and I have no problems with styles, so obviously I have a different brain to you (apart from the obvious gender related differences) - possibly being somewhat aspergers may be a clue....

I have run across some strange things in my days, e.g. Excel as a word processor and Powerpoint substitute, folk who think Word is great for mail merges when Publisher whips it's a$$ especially for mailing labels and name badges, etc etc ...

[skellington1]

It's less 'inability to figure out word styles' as 'experience with a far better program.' I can make word styles do what I want, but the program tries to 'help' too much -- doing things automatically, overriding, updating, etc -- and the menus are just too convoluted.

Basically, I'm lazy. I'm used to all of my options being available with a single click, and being clearly displayed, because InDesign is just that awesome.

[mmegaera]

I should say that I really like InDesign, and use it for my print books. But I can't imagine trying to format an ebook with it.

Most ebooks don't have much formatting beyond italics and font size, anyway (and, yes, feel free to howl about that now [g]).

[skellington1]

Yeah, it's a print program. I'm not saying it's better than word for every purpose, just that the style functionality in particular is a far slicker implementation.

I'm not going to howl about lack of formatting in ebooks -- why ever would I? Having seen the design sense of many self-pubbed covers (Ursula's being an exception), I think it's safer to only offer a limited selection of tools. :P Less snarkily and more seriously -- I think it's pretty rare that prose fiction benefits from expanded formatting options. Usually they just get in the way. All that changes if you're doing a cookbook or textbook or something, of course.

[mmegaera]

Also, InDesign had a much steeper learning curve for me.

[skellington1]

For many people, I'm sure it is. It's my bread and butter day job software -- I realize that experience isn't universal!

[steelmagghia]

The newer versions of Word are much worse about this than the older versions. When I switched to Word 2010, I thought I was going to KILL it. It just keeps changing things like it knows what you were going to do. And they changed all of the menus up so they're more complicated and less well labeled. I've never tried InDesign, and seeing how rarely I use Word even now that I'm not in college anymore, it just doesn't seem worth it to buy an expensive program.

[skellington1]

Oh, InDesign isn't a replacement for a word processor, by any means. It only makes sense if you're doing page layout for print regularly (or PDF distribution, I suppose). I only brought it up because it shares the 'styles' functionality with Word, showing a way that it could've been done much better!

And yes, every newer version of Word seems to have more of a mind of its own. That's what really drives me batty -- stop trying to predict what I want and just do what I say!

[mmegaera]

It took me a little while to get used to them, but if you're going to upload an ebook to Smashwords, they're essential, and now they're pretty much second nature. I had to go back and completely reformat my first ebook (all 115,000 words of it) using styles because otherwise Smashwords's meatgrinder basically chewed it up and spit it back out, and that was a pain. The meatgrinder is designed for use with styles.

So saying styles, or Word, is a pain for formatting ebooks is like saying it's a pain to have to use a web browser to access the Internet. They're necessary evils (although I really don't see them as evil, just as necessary tools).

[skellington1]

Oh, I wasn't comparing "using styles" to 'hand formatting." Even Word's style management is absolutely essential on a large doc. It's just frustrating in-use.

[archangelbeth]

Huh. I don't actually find Styles frustrating for the Meatgrinder. I write it in Normal, which is huge-font-size so I can see it. I put in hand-coded HTML-style bold and italics as I write, because I post it to LJ for my beta-readers. Then, later, I select everything and dump it into my SmashwordsNormal (times 12-point, I think), then do a search-and-replace on "chapter" to make that style "SMTitle" (times 14, bold, centered). Then I go through searching on my HTML of bold and italics, to see if they survived the conversion. If not, I fix. If so, yay. Strip out HTML. Add in front page meeble.

The real PITA is making a table of contents, since that has to be done by hand for the Meatgrinder, but that's just tedious.

(Disclaimer: I use Word X for Mac and will NEVER EVER UPGRADE EVER AGAIN EVER.)