word processing styles

As I posted about a month ago, I am editing and formatting a book. I mention this because a conversation with the author reminded me that most people who know how to use a program on their computer, do not understand why it works the way it does. I need to import the manuscript into a publishing program, but when I tried it, it would only get part of the way and then stop. I realized I would have to go back into the (dreaded) word processing program and check out the formatting. The result was my reformatting the entire manuscript.

We have to remember that computers don't think, they are just programmed to react to input. Because of this, ALL input, even the 'space' character that you can't really see, corresponds to a digits- a combination of zeros and ones, the basis of binary code. A computer sees a space character as 00100000! Most word processing programs have "styles" which can be applied to your text, telling the program what font you want, what size the font should be, whether or not the text is indented (all or just the first line), and the amount of spacing you'd like appiled to it. Setting up styles can take a few minutes, but will save you trying to figure out why your document is printing oddly when it refuses to cooperate.

If you use a recurring format, you can set it up once and save it as a template so it's ready to go next time you need to recreate that type of document. Taking the time to pay attention to this aspect of your text documents will save you time later; if you decide a section needs a different size font or a different typeface, making a quick change to the style will change all the instances in your document where that style applies. It saves you time and aggravation in the long run and your designer will both very impressed and very grateful. It also saves you money since your designer can make changes quickly and easily and you won't have to pay them to reformat your document. So please, don't indent your text by typing a bunch of spaces. Someone is just going to have to hunt them all down and take them out.

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