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Editing birthday "book" for my wife and having layout/editing trouble
Hello! I'm working on a meaningful personal project. My wife and I had a 7-year correspondence long ago and I've edited our letters down into a 400-page book I'll have bound for her birthday. After distilling the text down to the interesting bits, designing the artwork, etc, my last barrier, unexpectedly, is MS Word! I've realized that I know way less about Word than I suspected. I have to deliver this to the bookbinder soon and am worried I won't make my wife's birthday. If anyone could kindly assist with the following issues, I'd be immensely grateful. Hell, I'll send you $30 if you can successfully help me with these issues; not kidding! (I mean, I'm already paying the binder a pretty penny, so what's a few more bucks to make it to the finish line?). I'm hitting google anyway, but the clock is running out and I'm worried. Here are my current issues: How do I make the spacing changes of one page not push down the content of other pages or sections? The book is divided into lots of little 2-5 page "sections" (i.e., letters), but I'll be doing lots of last-minute edits and spacing changes all over. My nightmare is that if I delete paragraphs, alter spacing, etc, in one area, it's going to move the text all over the damn book every time, and I'll have to hunt for the ramifications across hundreds of pages every time. How can I "contain" the ripple effect of my edits to just stay within a particular section? 2. How do I get the page count to start (and end) within a specific range, and not on the actual first and last pages? 3. You know those header titles atop either side of book pages, usually with the name of the book and the chapter you're in? What's the best way to do this in Word? More importantly, how do I permanently associate a section of text to its corresponding page heading so that no matter where I move it, it'll stay in the same "chapter heading" section? 4. This is secondary, but I'd appreciate any guidance on great fonts to use. It feels as though the commonplace, everyday fonts like Arial and Times New Roman wouldn't necessarily work best for something like this. The binder suggested I stay away from sans serif, but other than that, I'm a bit adrift. 5. Just in case, if anyone knows of layouts or templates I can perhaps use, I'd appreciate that as well. I'm fishing around and the web and there's lots of folks who offer typesetting services, but I just don't have that much time left and think I'm just going to tackle it myself. For reference, I use Word from Office 365 (version 2010) on a Windows 10 64-bit PC. Thanks so much, I'd be grateful for any input at all. |
#2
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1. Word flows all content from top to bottom so any edits on page 1 will impact pagination on all subsequent pages. However you can insert a hard page break to force content to begin on a new page. This is easily done by pressing Ctrl-Enter. So if you expanded p1 so it now flows onto a second page which now includes content you wanted on a following page then you need to insert a hard page break at that location.
However, you should be using styles to format your content, and you can apply settings to a style which give you control over pagination. For instance if a particular style (like a chapter heading) should ALWAYS begin on a new page then that style should include the "Page Break Before" option in the Paragraph format. Lower level headings that don't have to begin on a new page should include "Keep with Next" to ensure they never fall on the bottom of a page and be separated from the following content. 2. Page counts are controlled at the Section level. If you have Section Breaks in your document then this can become complicated. At the simplest level, you can tell Word what page number a section begins on by going to Insert > Page Number > Format Page Numbers... 3. Assuming you used styles for your section headings, you can put a StyleRef field into the header to always show that section title in the header. 4. Fonts can have a effect on how a document stirs emotion. I don't recommend Arial or TNR for this application because I presume this is a work of passion. However, you said you have 400 pages already - therefore the bulk of the content needs to be set in a typeface that a) doesn't blow out the page count or b) strain the eyes and brain when reading large chunks. I recommend you pick a 'romantic' typeface for your Section Headings but go with a more standard, highly readable typeface for the bulk of the text. You can find what others consider a 'Romantic' typeface on this page . For the bulk of the text, I would recommend a less mainstream but still easily read typeface along the lines of 'Cormorant Infant', 'Garamond', 'Perpetua'. Look also at the name of the typeface as there is an opportunity to build on the sentiment - 'Perpetua' just sounds strong and everlasting whilst 'Comic Sans' is not going to be so forgiving. Finally, I would recommend you do some exploration on Charles Kenyon's Word site. He has collected a wealth of resources that will be a great help to you learning how to control Word. Feel free to come back here with specific questions but do spend some time looking around that site first because I think most of your questions will be answered there.
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Andrew Lockton Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia |
#3
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Thank you Andrew for your kind words. See also: |
#4
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Wow, thanks so much for this amazing guidance! I'm going to give it all a try and report back on how it went. I really appreciate it.
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