Word Put Well

Format your page and text block

It starts with your page size. If you are self-publishing with a service like Lulu or CreateSpace, you select the size of your book, and this will give you a set of constraints (margins, etc.) to start with. Your page size and maximum margins will generally determine roughly how wide your text block can be.

Next, you want to find a matching set of values for your final font size, line height, and line width. The method I’m going to give you here is based on the fact that there is a set of ideal proportions between font size, line height, and line width, that give maximum readability and aesthetic appeal. See this article about golden ratio typography for more information.

1. Take the width of your text block in inches and multiply by 72. This tells you how many “points” there are in one line of text.
2. Take the square root of this number and divide by 1.618 (the golden ratio). This gives you an optimal font size, in points, for your main text.
3. After rounding this font size to within half a point, multiply it by 1.618 again. This will give you your optimal line height in points.

You may need to reiterate a few times until you get a matching set of numbers that fit well on your page and do not need too much rounding.

Configure Word’s typesetting

You can actually get book-quality typesetting from Word if you just change a few options.

A couple of points about paragraph formatting:

• Make sure your main text is set to “justified”, and not “flush left.” While it is currently better to set text flush-left on the web, books look better justified and are nearly always set that way.
• Don’t have spaces between paragraphs in your main body text.
• Paragraphs should have a first-line indent of the width of about 2 or 3 characters, but only where two or more paragraphs are joined together: the first paragraph of any group of paragraphs should have no first-line indent. (This could be a pain to manage; I tend to handle it by making all paragraphs indented by default, then going back and manually removing the indent from first paragraphs at some later stage in the editing.)

Make sure the following settings are enabled under the “Compatibility” options. To get to these options, click on the circular “Office Button” in the upper left corner, and then click Word Options at the very bottom of the menu. Then click Advanced, scroll down to the bottom of that section, and click the + next to Layout Options. On older versions, click the Tools menu, then Options (or Edit → Preferences on a Mac) then click the Compatibility tab.

• Put a check next to “Do full justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows.” This allows justified text to contract as well as expand, making the automatic adjustments look a lot better.
• “Don’t add extra space for raised/lowered characters.”
• “Don’t expand character spaces on the line ending SHIFT+RETURN.” This ensures that lines you end with a soft return will still be properly justified.
• “Suppress ‘Space Before’ after a hard page or column break.”

Configure Word’s hyphenation settings. On the toolbar, click the Page Layout tab, then Hyphenation drop-down button → Hyphenation Options. (On older versions, click Tools menu → Language → Hyphenation.)

• Put a check next to “Automatically hyphenate document.”
• Set “Hyphenation zone” to about half an inch or so.
• Set “Limit consecutive hyphens” to 3.

Finally, enable ligatures. If your font is of good quality and has alternates for character combinations like fi and ffi, this will tell Word to use them automatically. This can only be done in MS Word 2010 or later.

• Open the Font settings window. You can do this by selecting some text, right-clicking and selecting Font from the menu, but I recommend setting this up in whatever “style” you use for your body text (e.g., “Normal”): Home tab, right click the style, select Modifiy, then Format button → Font.
• Click the Advanced tab, then next to the Ligatures option, select Standard Only.

Sources

These tips are compiled from many sources, and in many cases updated for clarity or accuracy with newer versions of Word.

• How to Enable OpenType ligatures in Word 2010
• Typesetting in Microsoft Word by Jack Lyon
• Golden Ratio typography by Chris Pearson

There’s a scene in the movie Without a Clue where Sherlock Holmes bursts in on Watson and his clients. He is disheveled, slightly drunk, and obviously in some distress - giving exactly the wrong impression to those Watson wants to impress. Watson, thinking quickly, pulls Holmes into another room. After only a few seconds of muffled crashing sounds, he pushes Holmes into the living room again: properly dressed, calm, collected, and ready to play upon his clients as upon stringed instruments.

Occasionally, I find myself in Watson’s shoes. It happened again last week. I got a phone call: they had a 180-page engineering report due to the client that day. They needed to combine MS Word documents from three different engineers into a single file, but when they tried, the list numbering and the headers and the formatting went completely bonkers. When I got copies of the documents they were trying to combine, I found three different narrative styles, headers with varying and broken numbering schemes, and everything generally a mess.

I hate to think what would happen if a client tried to use a document like this for real decision-making.

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Steve Pilgrim asked me recently whether I’m still a fan of Exacompta Basics. I took a month to think about it and here is my current and well-considered opinion.

To give the question some context, I use blank books like this for journaling, not for sketching, drawing, painting, todo lists, or note-taking. A journal is a somewhat more personal affair, and you want it to feel personal. This is the position from which I am evaluating these sketchbooks.

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Perhaps you have read the very-popular Getting Things Done by David Allen. GTD is a great methodology for managing your life. It can seem complicated but it’s not.

Most of the juice in this game is in simply getting and maintaining a clean slate. Just start doing these three things:

1. Get a label maker and a box of file folders. File all your papers in labeled folders, with one alphabetical order for everything.
2. Empty your email inbox. If an email needs action or a response, write that down on a todo list. Then either delete the email or archive it. But get it out of your inbox.
3. Find something you know you need to do and do it.

All of the other stuff in the book will make sense the more you apply yourself to maintaining that clean slate: no loose papers, no old emails in your inbox.

Step three is kind of important in all of this.