The inside pages of my books are just Word documents. “But you used to do design,” I hear you scream (please stop screaming), “how can you do typography and page layout in a word-processing program! Heretic!”
Actually, Word does all the typography I need — styles, sections, page numbering. The one thing I could never get right, though, which always irked me, was justification.
The books I produce from my micropress all have “ragged-right” justification, with a straight left margin but lines that end wherever they happen to end on the right-hand side. Most novels have “full” justification, meaning that the text lines up straight against both margins, with the words balanced between them.
The problem I had with full justification in Word is that, not always, but every once in a while, I’d get a line that ended like this, which I considered unreadable and ugly:
Today I finally found out how to fix this: just hit ENTER after the line. Voila, fixed!
Turns out it was only happening at the end of a chapter because I didn’t put in the final carriage return; the next line was just a page break starting a new chapter, which messed up Word’s sense of how to deal with the line, since it never ended properly.
I’m printing out manuscripts of Finitude in book form, and am thrilled to be able to produce them using a much quicker process because the book is short, and now I can have properly justified paragraphs, too!
Isn’t that exciting? (Humour me here.)
