Setting Up Book Pages

Two weeks ago, I explained how to calculate page margins when typesetting a book in Microsoft Word. I neglected, however, to explain how to set up the pages themselves. So here goes.

For most books, you'll need three different page layouts:

1. The first page of a chapter.

2. A left (verso) page.

3. A right (recto) page.

Dedicated typesetting programs allow you to set these up using "master pages" that act as page templates. Word lacks such a feature but still makes it possible to set up different kinds of pages. Here's how:

1. Create a new Word document.

2. Click File > Page Setup. On a Macintosh, click the "Margins" button.

3. Click the Layout tab. Notice that the preview shows only one page.

4. Under "Section start," select "Odd page" if you want every chapter to start on the traditional odd page, or "New page" if you want to let the chapters fall where they may. Yes, you can start chapters on even pages if you insist.

5. Under "Headers and footers," put a checkmark in the boxes labeled "Different odd and even" and "Different first page." The preview now shows two pages. Hey, this is starting to look like a page layout!

6. Go back to the Margins tab.

7. Notice that you can set margin size for top and bottom, left and right. In Word 2002 or later, under "Pages," select "Mirror margins" from the dropdown list. In Word 97, 98, 2000, or 2001, put a checkmark in the box labeled "Mirror margins." Notice that "Left" and "Right" have become "Inside" and "Outside."

8. Set the margins for your pages. (You can include extra for the gutter if your printing needs require it, but I try to avoid this.) See the newsletter for January 28 for more information:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1715887587

9. Click the OK button to put your decisions into effect.

Next week: Setting up headers and footers.

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READERS WRITE

I had some interesting responses to last week's feature article, "Size and Zoom." Some readers misunderstood (or I miscommunicated). The point of the article wasn't "Here's how to size your Word window." It was "Hey! Size your Word window!" Apologies to those who thought the article was too elementary.

And many thanks to Dan A. Wilson and Eric Fletcher, expert editors both, who sent the following useful messages:

Dan wrote:

I think your position is the right one: it isn't a matter of TELLING people HOW TO ADJUST, but of REMINDING them TO REMEMBER to resize or zoom, or both. I, too, have seen countless cases of tennis-match-spectator neck syndrome caused by the use of a newly purchased monitor at full display max. Especially now that LCDs are so widely in use, it's important that users learn to adjust window sizes.

Almost all of my programs except Word and my browsers now run in windows that show my desktop wallpaper behind them on all four sides, because running them any larger than that on a 19" LCD is just plain silly unless you're viewing them from across the room. In Word, I either run single document pages at 80 to 90 percent zoom, or side-by-side pages at 75 percent, and the displays of the latter are STILL larger than those of pages at maximized display and 100 percent zoom on my 17" CRT on the other desk.

The advantage of the larger monitors today is that you can display MORE; using them to display the same old stuff LARGER is pointless for most programs, and an invitation to whiplash injuries.

Large LCD monitors have very high native resolution settings, and are optimized for those settings. Running a 17" LCD monitor at a resolution of 800 x 600 is not only bad for the monitor but bad for the eyes: even the best image available at that resolution on such a monitor will be fuzzy.

I use a 19" LCD with Word windows maximized but with my zoom set to 90% normally. Gives me a slightly larger-than-lifesize view of the page.

Most of the time, though, I use the taskbar right-click control to Tile Windows Vertically, so that I can have two different docs or two different views (or versions) of the same doc open side-by-side, each with its own toolbar. I set the zoom for each doc to 75% then, and the page on the screen is still about the size of an 8.5 x 11 sheet. This is great when I want to check text against the Biblio for presence and identity of entry info, for instance.

Eric Fletcher wrote:

One of my favorite techniques to pass on to friends with similarly-aging eyes is to use the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Most Microsoft applications will zoom in and out when the CTRL button is pressed while rolling the wheel. I'm not sure what the Mac equivalent is but I assume there would be one.

In "Normal" view with wrap to window on, zooming in increases the font size and wraps the text in whatever size window you have available. Zooming to a much larger size temporarily is great to be able to differentiate between accents or footnote numbers.

In "Print" view, zooming way out to 10% lets you see thumbnails of many pages at once (15x7 with my current monitor settings). You can't read anything of course, but you can get somewhere within the document very quickly if you recognize the structure (say for chapter starts, tables of contents, tables, or graphics): just click in the page and zoom in.

The other use I've found for this capability recently is in conjunction with the "find all" capability for either Find or select all in the style task pane. When elements are selected--and therefore highlighted--many will be off the current screen. If you zoom out, you can see more selections at once. Of course, clicking to be able to zoom in removes the selection highlight but since both the Find dialog and task pane are modal, it is easy to reinstate the highlights to see any local to where you clicked.

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RESOURCES

Want to more about book design and page layout? Here are a couple of good places to get started:

Jacci Howard Bear's graphic design tutorials and procedures:

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/graphicdesign/

John Magnik's typography and page layout tutorials:

http://www.typography-1st.com/typo/txt-lay.htm

Size and Zoom

I recently noticed that one of my colleagues, a fellow editor, was reading a document set in 10-point type, with the lines running all the way across his giant 21-inch monitor. He was having a terrible time "tracking" from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, and he was squinting, bending forward in his chair, and generally looking miserable.

"Why don't you shrink the window?" I asked.

"What?" he said.

"Size the window so it's not so wide. You'll be able to read more easily."

"How do I do that?" he asked.

"You know those three little boxes on the upper right? The left one minimizes the window, and the right one closes it."

"Yes."

"The middle one makes it so you can size the window." [As you've noticed, my colleague was using a PC. On a Macintosh, you can just grab the lower right of a window and size to your heart's content.]

"Show me," he said.

I took the mouse and clicked the middle "Restore" button (which looks like two cascading windows). Then I positioned the mouse pointer on the right-hand border of the window, pressed and held the left mouse button, and sized the window to about six inches across.

Next, I clicked View > Zoom and bumped up the Zoom size to 200 percent.

"How's that?" I asked.

"Lots better," he said.

If you usually edit a document with the Word window stretching all the way across your screen, you might want to change your strategy. If you were designing a book, you probably wouldn't allow a line length of more than about 24 picas (four inches). Otherwise, the text would be too hard too read. You won't torture your readers, so why torture yourself?

Another thing: If you work with a wide, wide window, you'll find yourself scrolling and scrolling and scrolling back and forth on a line. If your window is relatively narrow, you can often move to a certain word by scrolling one or two lines down (a keystroke or two) rather than 50 characters across. You may not realize how much time you spend scrolling through text, but it does add up.

Finally, remember that you don't have to look at text in its actual size. Zoom was invented for a reason. Go ahead, make your text so you can read it from six feet away. Amaze your friends. Make your life easier. That's what all these tools are for.

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RESOURCES

In 2001, I wrote a couple of articles about using sample text while designing a book or generally experimenting with Word:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705763701

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705865120

But if you're tired of lorem ipsum and that quick brown fox, you might be interested in the ungreek.toolbot engine, an online tool that gives you the option of several different source texts from which to generate sample (gibberish) text, including the Rubaiyat, Jane Eyre, the Tao Te Ching, and the Critique of Pure Reason (in German). It's fun to play with, and useful, too:

http://ungreek.toolbot.com/

Calculating Page Margins

In past newsletters, I've sometimes discussed aspects of typesetting in Microsoft Word:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708754845

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708956278

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711888513

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711932079

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1712050217

One item I haven't addressed is how to calculate page margins *for publication,* which is not the same as just clicking File > Page Setup and putting in some numbers. If you needed to set up page margins for a printed book, for example, you'd need to set your margins to accommodate the size of your page and the text block on your page. This is not the same as *paper* size, which we'll say is 8.5 by 11 inches, a U.S. standard.

Let's say you want your *page* size (the size of your book) to be 7.5 by 9 inches. Here's what you'd do:

1. Calculate the margins you'd need to set to obtain the trimmed page size. (If you were using crop marks, this would be the measurement between them and the edge of the paper.)

- For the side margins, 8.5 minus 7.5 equals 1 inch. Divide that inch in half because, by golly, you have two side margins. That gives you a margin of .5 inch on each side of the page.

- For the top and bottom margins, 11 minus 9 equals 2 inches, divided in half equals a 1-inch margin for top and bottom.

2. Calculate the space from the edges of your *text block* to the top, bottom, and sides of your page. For convenience, let's say you're going to have 1 inch all around, but you could make those measurements anything you wanted. If it's 1 inch, then you'd just add 1 inch to the side margins, making 1.5 inches for each, and 1 inch to the top and bottom margins, making 2 inches for each.

4. Finally, click File > Page Setup and set your margins according to your calculations: side margins should be 1.5 inches, and top and bottom margins should be 2 inches.

Now when you type in your text, you'll get a text block of, let's see, 8.5 - (1.5 + 1.5) = 5.5 inches wide, and 11 - (2 + 2) = 7 inches high.

Depicted graphically (sort of), here's what we've created:

-----------------

| ------------- |

| | --------- | |

| | --------- | |

| ------------- |

-----------------

The smallest box, in the middle, is the text block, 5.5 by 7 inches.

Out from that is the trim size (page size), 7.5 by 9 inches.

And the outside border, of course, is the paper size, 8.5 by 11 inches.

You can adjust the position of header and footer on the page by modifying their paragraph style to include space before and after as needed.

If you need to add crop marks, you should check out our WordSetter program, which will create them for you--yes, even in Microsoft Word:

http://www.editorium.com/14000.htm

http://www.editorium.com/wordsetter/TH_10.htm

Thanks to Dorian Cougias for suggesting this topic.

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READERS WRITE

Autoformatting in Tables

Steve Hudson wrote:

You cannot add new table types to the Table Autoformat list, nor can you edit existing ones.

HOWEVER, you *can* get many more autoformat layouts by setting various properties of the autoformat to FALSE. For example, setting them all to false for table style normal gives you an invisible (borderless) table. By using grid with no first column, font changes, or first row, you get a nice boxed grid. You can also set the default line width for tables as well.

Anything more complex has to be handled by first inserting a table and then styling it up via macro. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, this is accomplished by styling the table, then styling the first row, then styling the first column.

In Word XP we get table styles (they are making styles even more abominable by giving us different flavours), so I am guessing it MAY be possible to set autoformats of your own to a greater degree. Until they work properly however, I ain't investigating them.

An extract from my Word Spellbook (available from http://www.wordheretic.com):

Auto-formatting or custom default tables (Word 2000)

Highly specialized custom formats are difficult (when not impossible) to do. Very simple formats are somewhat easier and more likely to succeed. If you are prepared to bend your style guide to what is possible and what is not, you can get some satisfactory automatic results without having to resort to macros.

You can also just use Autotext entries to store a pre-formatted table in--you can drag these Autotext entries onto a menu if required.

As a quick aside, when dealing programmatically with tables, there are two subtle tricks. One is the .range.cells(n) object that serializes all the cells in the selected range. This tables(1).range.cells(k) is an easier way to address the collection. Secondly, you can do groovy table stuff via the selection object that you can't via a range . . .

Back to the plot. Inspect the Insert Table > AutoFormat dialog. To get all your tables inserted with invisible borders, select the simple 1 format and CLEAR all the little checkboxes. Viola! Problem solved.

Whatever rows and columns I give it will be the default that is used from there on in when I tick "Use this as the default style."

To extend this concept, you are NOT limited to JUST the formats presented. You can also use just parts of them! We did this above and used NO PARTS to give us NO styling--or an auto-invisible table.

For example, many people could get away with Grid 5 with the font option cleared to make themselves a nice grid.

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Rob Little wrote:

First, in 2002, any new table style becomes a table autoformat (it shows up in the table autoformat dialog).

Second, as for basing your table style on an empty style, use "Table Normal." Table normal is statically defined (like "Default Paragraph Font" for character styles) and cannot be changed by any user. (This is different than the "Normal" paragraph style which can be edited by users). "Table Grid" is the default table style because it includes a Grid border (among other things).

Here are a couple of things to know about table styles:

* Table styles cannot define "structural" elements of a table (merging of cells, etc). This means they cannot define the width of cells or the height of rows (changing the width of cells from row to row implicitly merges cells, for example).

* All table autoformats in Word 2002 are Table Styles and can be customized by the user. (New styles can be based on them, too.) Conversely, this means that anything you see done in the table autoformats can be built from scratch through the table styles user interface.

* Table styles define character, paragraph, and table/cell/row properties. These properties are evaluated *before* the paragraph style's properties (order of calculation is TableStyle + ParaStyle + CharStyle + DirectFormatting = Calculated Properties). For example: If your table style defines the "Whole Table" as being "Arial," then you'll see "Arial." If you apply a paragraph style that applies "Courier," then "Arial" + "Courier" = "Courier" (because the paragraph style wins).

* When you apply a table style, the character and paragraph properties of the table are *not* reset. This is different than paragraph styles, which reset the character properties of the paragraph before applying the paragraph (with some exceptions). So, if you have a table which has a lot of direct character/paragraph formatting (for example, fonts, sizes, justification, and so on), and you apply a Table Style (or Table Autoformat), that direct formatting will still be there (and will beat any table style properties). If you want to get rid of that direct formatting, select the table and choose Edit/Clear/Formats (or click Clear Formatting on the Styles and Formatting taskpane). This will reset the table contents to just the table style. (You can clear formatting before or after applying the table style; it makes no difference.)

* When you use the "Applies to" part of table styles (this is used in almost all autoformats), you are telling Word to run a set of rules against your table when it applies formatting. For example, if you tell it to format the "First Row" with bold text, then every time the table changes, Word makes sure to format the first row with bold text--even if a new first row is inserted. In Word 2000 and before, the table autoformats were "static"--once the last row (for example) was formatted, if you inserted a new last row, you would end up with 2 rows looking like the last row. In 2002, the last row recalculates, and you get just one last row. This allows things like banding (every other row shaded, for example).

* There is a delicate interaction between table styles and the Normal style. Recall that the paragraph style is applied on top of the table style. This means that any formatting you have in your Normal style will almost always override your table style formatting (I say almost because not *all* styles are based on "Normal"). For example: If your Normal style has "Arial" in it, and you apply a table style that defines "Courier," you will see Arial. The paragraph style wins. There is a way around this, but it would take some space to explain, so I'll provide the solution if people ask for it (or I could leave it as an exercise for the reader). Are there really people still reading at this point?

* Because of the interaction between the Normal style and table styles, there is an even more delicate interaction with font sizes. First, you just plain can't force the table to use 10-point text. If you set the table style to 10 points, it won't apply it. I really don't want to try to explain why.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I think everything above is accurate, but it's late and its entirely possible that I flubbed something up. Feel free to send me comments or corrections and I'll incorporate them.

Thanks to Steve and Rob for all of this useful information.

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RESOURCES

I recently changed my Web browser's home page from Google to Refdesk.com. Why? Because Refdesk includes a Google search box *and* a bunch of useful references that I've already had occasion to use in editing. Maybe you'll find it helpful too:

http://www.refdesk.com/instant.html