PDF Perfidy--or Why PDF's and eBooks Don't Make Good Pals

Kimberly Hitchens is the founder and owner of Booknook.biz, an ebook production company that has produced more than 2,000 ebooks for over 1500 authors and imprints.

This week's blog article was inspired by both Liza Daly and editor Rob Bacon.  Liza, of Threepress, had written about the need for actual "PDF Conversion."  Rob wrote to me, saying, "but isn't this what you do?  Isn't she wrong?"  To which I replied,"Sadly, no; the only way to 'convert' PDF is with a great deal of manual labor."  Rob asked me for an article for his newsletter for his website, "The Perfect Write," and about the time this article appears, so will it appear in his newsletter.  I hope that some frustrated authors out there will find it useful.  It's a bit long--but it's covering a fair amount of ground, so please try to bear with me.

What's Wrong With My PDF→Word Conversion?  It Looks Perfect!

When people look at the results of automated "PDF to Word®" conversion sites, or software, different people see different things.  To an author, who only has a PDF copy of a book from her backlist, it looks like manna from heaven—a Word® file that looks perfect!  To an ebook professional, however, it’s like the movie Lake Placid—a serene, gorgeous surface, beneath which danger lurks.    

You’ve probably heard people talk about how they tried to upload a PDF at the KDP®, or tried to use a program like Adobe Acrobat® to "make" a Word® file from their PDF, only to have achieved wholly unexpected and dismal results.  This happens a lot, particularly to people who don’t have expertise in Word®.  When you use a program like Acrobat®, or one of those online conversion web sites, the file that you get back will often look exactly like you think it should.  And you’ll think it’s great, and be thrilled.  But, underneath, where it counts—where Word's invisible codes tell text what it is and how to display—lurks an unholy mess waiting to bite you when you try to actually use that file, rather than just looking at it.  

Let’s look at one real-life example, to kick off the discussion.  This prospective client came to us, having exported his “Word®” file from PDF, and then uploading the file to Amazon®.  As he ended up coming to us, you can already predict (plot spoiler ahead!), that the results weren’t good.      

When a display or layout program like Acrobat® tries to export a Word® file, it tries to “tell” Word® what it thinks it is seeing.  Because a PDF is not a word-processed file, it’s using a completely different set of codes, and different types of codes, to achieve the layout that you see when you view it.  This is because Acrobat® is a layout program, not a word processor.  Acrobat® and other layout programs only care about how the end product looks; word processors care about what the elements (words, sentences, paragraphs) in a document are.  Do you remember the old parable about three blind men and an elephant?  Well, the Acrobat® conversion to Word® format is a bit like that; Acrobat® tells Word® based upon what it thinks it sees; what it interprets as your intent—not what Word® actually needs to “hear.”  Let’s look at how Acrobat® “sees” a page of text, to the naked eye:

Figure 1:  This is a page from a PDF, exported by Adobe Acrobat to Word. Looks great, right? Perfectly normal?

Figure 1 is one of the pages, in Word, that was the result of an “automatic” export from Adobe Acrobat® to MS Word.  (You can see full-size copies of both images used in this article at:  https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zz18q9jdls181xa/RHDMacY0Qc )

This small section looks fine, right?  But those of you with eagle-eyes may have noticed that something isn’t quite right—why is the first word in each line underlined with the dreaded squiggly-green line?  Why does Word® think that’s a grammar error?  To see why that’s happening, let’s look at this exact same page with “reveal codes” turned on (what you see if you click the pilcrow icon ¶ on your Word® 2007-2010 Ribbon, or in the main toolbar for older editions):  

Figure 2: Holy Pilcrow, Batman!  What are all those ¶'s, and what do they mean? 

Now you can see what’s really going on.  When Acrobat® exported that file into Word®, it “thought” that every line was its own paragraph.  That’s right—if you tried to upload this file at the KDP, every single line you see there would come out, in Kindle, as its own paragraph, not words inside a much larger paragraph.  That’s what Word® is trying to tell you, with those squiggly green lines—it’s trying to say, “Hey, you didn’t capitalize the first letter of this new sentence.”  Word® thinks that those first words on each line are actually the first words in a new sentence. 

Why does it think that?  Because immediately before those words, Word® obeys a pilcrow command (at the end of each line, over there in the right-hand margin).   That pilcrow instructs Word, “I am marking the end of a paragraph.”  Word® knows that the very next word is the first word of a new paragraph, so it must be the first word of a new sentence, and therefore, should be capitalized.  That’s what those little pilcrows, and the little squiggly green lines are telling you:  Here There Be Dragons!  

But:  Won't It look Fine, Anyway?  Without Those Cruddy Pilcrows?

When this file was exported to Kindle by the prospective client, what he saw, to his horror, was this (I’m simulating the actual output, starting with the first line of the “paragraph” near the bottom of the section shown that starts with, “Some of the nuns…”):

Figure 3:  Obviously, not what he expected!

Obviously—this was not what he’d had in mind.  This was prose, not poetry or some type of experimental Haiku.  He’d expected his Kindle book would look like Figure 1…but what he got was far, far different, making the book unreadable and thus, unsaleable.  Why did this happen? 

The way a word processor works is actually pretty simple.  Every single element in a word-processed file, whether it's a paragraph, or an italicized word or phrase, or smallcaps, has invisible tags surrounding it that identifies it to the program and tells it how to display.  More importantly, those codes (tags) tell the program what it is. (A word, a paragraph, etc.)  An example of how this looks in code (HTML), which is what actually runs word processors, and is used to make eBooks, is this: 

<p class=”indent”><i>This is a paragraph in italics, in HTML</i>, which is the “language” used to create Kindle books.</p>

What this looks like, on a Kindle device:

This is a paragraph in italics, in HTML, which is the “language” used to create Kindle books.

A word or phrase in italics, for example, is surrounded by tags like this to start italicization: <i>.  The program is told to stop italicizing the words by a closing tag, which looks like this: </i>.  This is true whether it’s Word, Wordperfect, Open Office, Libre Office…well, you get the drift. 

In the above example, you see me tell the program that the paragraph starts with the word “This,” after the opening paragraph tag, and ends with the period after the word “books.”  The italics styling starts with the word “This,” and stops after the word, “HTML.”  In most word-processors, most of this happens invisibly to you, and can only be revealed using either Word’s Styles menu, or by working in the actual code, as most ebook conversion companies do.  This is the “black box” effect; magic happens behind the screen that makes stuff “just happen.” 

Exhibit 1 and the result shows just one very simplified explanation of how things go badly wrong when exporting PDF files to Word.  I used it because it’s the easiest to demonstrate.  Far larger, and harder to find and fix, land mines await the unwary. 

Much text formatting, like italics, can go horribly wrong.  One such case is a client that came to us because no matter what she did, when she uploaded her “Word” file (made from her PDF) to the KDP, none of her italics showed up.  It turned out that Acrobat® told Word® that the italics were in a special italic font that isn’t available on Kindle—so of course, the italics never showed up.  Sometimes, Acrobat® tells Word® that a symbol exists, but uses a special symbol font to create it—and again, that symbol’s font may not be on your computer, and it’s certainly not on Kindle devices.

It’s important to remember:  PDF is all about layout, and how text looks; word-processors and eBooks are all about what elements are (words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, sections), and then how they are displayed.  In eBooks, the structure (what something is) takes precedence over how it looks.    

All real paragraphs must have that pilcrow code at the end; that instructs Word® that the paragraph is where it should be, and that the next paragraph starts immediately.  But again, most of the chaos caused with “auto-magic” convert-PDF-to-Word® programs is not visible to the eye in Word; the problems only surface after the document is converted into code.  Even I, after five years of making ebooks, can sometimes not see the problems that are hidden deep in the code of a “faux” Word® file until I export the file into code, and then find the hidden Dragons waiting for me. 

If you can, it’s best to leave conversion from PDF to Word® or eBook to experts.  Yes, I know that sounds self-serving, as I own an ebook-making firm, but it’s true.  If you have a lot of expertise in Word® (or another word processor); if you have a true command of Word’s Styles, macros, etc., you can absolutely do all the clean-up yourself, but whether you do it yourself, or pay someone else to do it, all that “cruft” that is put inside a PDF-exported/created Word® file must be cleaned up before you can make a successful, clean, beautiful-looking ebook. 

The “paragraph” problem can be cleaned up with time and some effort, even by those without a lot of expertise in Word.  You can go through and delete all those unwanted paragraph codes, but you have to do it one line at a time.  Don’t do what one of our clients did:  she thought it would be “faster and easier” to use search and replace.  She chose “all” on the search and replace menu—and ended up with a book that was one giant paragraph long!

***

Remember:  you can see full-size examples of today's images and examples at this link:  CLICK HERE.   You'll want to see them larger size in order to view them clearly.   This is "stuff" worth reviewing, and worth knowing about before you decide to take on PDF→Word→Kindle conversion for yourself.  As I said above:  it can be done by a determined beginner, but do know and understand what you're getting into, upfront, and don't be easily discouraged.  Good Luck!

A Dozen Do's and Don'ts on Prepping Your Novel for ePublishing

By:  Kimberly Hitchens.  Well, as you all know, I originally promised to blog, two weeks ago, about the ISBN monopoly controlled by initially the ISBN.org and then, here in the US, Bowker.  However, that post was delayed by an unforeseen “cat-astophe,” when The Amazing Zep (“Zeppelin,” properly known as Suncoon Tucson), a 7-month old Maine Coon kitten, decided he could fly off the top of our 7’ cat condo.  Obviously, I’ve allowed him to watch entirely too many Marvel Comics movies.  He leapt from the top of the Condo, aiming at a nearby artwork niche, and the results were, shall we say, not good; he nearly came to be known as Hindenburg.  Half a house-payment and 5 exhausting days later of caring for him 24/7, he’s fine, the little monster, but I apologize for missing the blog.  His nefarious face is shown here, so all will know the miscreant.  (And, yes, because most people look at kitten pics and go, “awwwwwwwwwwwwww…;” I’m shamelessly exploiting your weakness for kittens.)

But yesterday, Editor Extraordinaire Jodie Renner dropped me a line, and asked me if I happened to have a list, or a link to a list, of tips for preparing your Word document for e-publishing, whether you’re going to use an eBookformatting company like mine, or DIY.  She suggested it would make a good blog post—and I’d do anything to oblige her.  So today’s topic is What NOT to do in your Word document, either to keep costs down, or to make it easier for yourself/your formatter, to create your book in a gorgeous style.

1.       Everybody already knows #1; use Word’s built-in styles whenever possible.  Use them to automatically indent your paragraphs; don’t use the tab key or the space-bar (5 times or however many).  Now, an experienced formatting won’t have difficulty with this.  But if you’re using someone new, or doing it yourself, this will cause you problems.  Moreover, if you use Word’s built-in styles for all your regular narrative paragraphs, you shan’t have a problem, when you upload to the  KDP, with inconsistent paragraph styling—which you will have if you “style” every paragraph differently, not deliberately, but through misadventure, by not knowing and understanding Word’s styles.  If you don’t have a basic understanding of how these work (and how to see how they are working), take a few minutes and watch this video (not from my company, but we think it’s nice and clear enough that we host it in our Knowledgebase) on our Knowledgebase (you can enlarge it to full-screen for easy of viewing):  http://booknookbiz.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/182863-video-on-word-styles Our Tutorials section also has a video on the TOC and how to use headings (just click the “Tutorials and Videos” breadcrumb to take you to that section, or click “Home” above the article header to rummage around to your heart’s content.

2.       Speaking of…Header styles.  Very few people seem to know about or use what used to be called the “Document Map” in word.  If you use “Header Styles” to create your chapter headers, you’ll be able to easily navigate through your document by simply enabling the “Navigation Pane” on the left-hand side  (In Word 2007-2010, “View—> Click “Navigation Pane”).  If you’ve used header styles for every chapter head—lo!  Right there in the Navigation Pane, you’ll be able to see (and jump to instantly) the beginning of every single chapter.  An even bigger “freebie” side effect of doing this—you can auto-generate your Table of Contents.  This is incredibly handy for those of you determined to “DIY.”  For the video on how to do this, please see our second Knowledgebase video:  http://booknookbiz.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/182864-video-on-headings-and-toc-in-word If you don’t like the LOOK of the header styles that are available to you, you can change that with a simple click—but that’s generally covered in the first video, so by the time you get to the second video, you should already know how to fix that.  This can also save you some ducats at the formatters, depending upon how their pricing lists are structured.

3.       Lists.  Ironically, for either price-savings or saving yourself DIY brain-damage, don’t use numbered or bulleted lists, IF they are indented.  If you must have a bulleted or numbered list (yes—like the one I’m using here, hence the irony), and you’re going to publish to Amazon, it’s a giant pain.  If you can live with the bulleted or numbered list at the left-margin, it will work fine.  However, if you are attempting to indent them, what will happen is that the wrap-indents will NOT align perfectly. This is due to the ability of the Kindle e-reader (of all kinds, excluding the Fire, which can do this quite nicely) to rescale fonts.  The “wrap,” inside the secret-sauce code of a kindle book, is set in (either) a percentage (of the available screensize) or “ems” which are relative to the font, unlike text measurements—which are absolute.  What this means is that your text wrap will, on an indented, bulleted or numbered item, look perfect at one font size—but  will creep, ever so slightly, left-or right, as the font-size changes, relative to the selected font-size, if that makes any sense.  To wit:  if you increase the fontsize, you increase the amount of the second-line “indent” in the wrap.  However, the first line remains as it was set up (don’t ask), so your second line creeps left or right.  If this doesn’t faze you, then rock on.  If you have bulleted lists, and want them to align as perfectly as possible---well, you know where to find us.  ;-).  Making them perfect can’t be done in Word.

4.       Return-itis.  This one may seem obvious, but, I kid thee not, we get at least one manuscript a week in that is actually typed with a “return” keyed at the end of each LINE.  Not paragraph, but LINE.  Seriously; we have authors who don’t understand that Word wraps automatically, nor how to set line-spacing, so in order to make their manuscript “submission-ready,” they type to the right margin, and hit “enter” twice.  Please:  for your sanity and mine, don’t do that.

5.       Don’t create a dedicated STYLE to italicize or bold your text.  Simply highlight the text you want to italicize, and use the “I” button at the top of the ribbon/menu.  Same for Bold.  If you create styles, but also use the buttons, you can create inconsistencies in your work, and if you’re not a Styles-Genius, it can get confusing. 

6.       Fonts!  If you ever read what I write here, you know that you have to license any copyrighted fonts you use.  That’s the first thing; the second thing, however, is equally important.  If you use fonts in your book, to set apart various types of content—for example, the interior FP thoughts of your killer—be aware of the following:  the Kindle e-ink devices, as well as the majority of all e-ink devices, like the Nook e-ink readers and the Kobos—do not support more than a single font.  In the Kindle legacy devices—still the most widely-used of all reading devices, of any brand—they have a single font, called “Caecilia,” which is a Times New Roman clone.  Therefore, although you can license and embed fonts that will work spiffily in ePUB readers and in the Kindle Fire, be aware that firstly, that second font, despite your wishes, won’t show up on the Kindle legacy devices and second, if you’re trying to do this from Word on a DIY basis, it won’t work.  Despite your best efforts, as far as I know, if you endeavor to upload a Word file with multiple fonts in it, you will not obtain the desired result; font embedding has to be done from within HTML or XHTML (HTML you used to be married to) to work correctly.  On a Kindle you can use a second font—a Courier monospaced font—if absolutely necessary, but it doesn’t reflow like the TNR font, and it’s not very attractive.  You should, if you are going to DIY, consider using a fleuron or some other graphic device, to set that “other font” or inner thoughts, or whatever it is, apart from the rest of your regular narrative flow.

7.       Poetry, song lyrics, and other miscellaneous material that is indented and somewhat “columnar.”  For ease of formatting, both for yourself and any formatting company, don’t use “enter” at the end of the line; use a line break, which is SHIFT+ENTER, as opposed to the usual “enter.”  Don’t use this coding pair to create a new paragraph, but if you intend to display poetry or song lyrics, this is the combo to use at the end of each “line.”  At the end of each STANZA, however, you would use the usual “enter” key, twice, as you would for a scene break.  (Yes—there are better ways to do this, using Word’s built-in Styles, but this will work “okay” for both DIY and for any formatter worth his/her salt.)

8.       Spelling.  Yes, I know—how obvious is this? But you would be shocked at the huge number of manuscripts we get in here that are chock-full of spelling mistakes.  I think that authors invent character names and places, which Word, naturally highlights with the ubiquitous red line; and they get so accustomed to seeing that, they ignore the REAL errors.  If you have invented names, places, etc., in your ms, tell your spellcheck to “Ignore” those, so that you stop being “spellcheck blind.”  Correcting spelling errors that your readers find, post-production, is embarrassing for you; and if you’ve used a formatter, it’s expensive, as editing in HTML isn’t like editing in Word. 

9.       Hyphenation and Track Changes:  (A Twofer!). First, if you’ve used hyphenation throughout the document, for line endings (optional hyphens), you should do a search and replace, and remove all optional hyphens.  If you don’t, they can show up as regular, non-optional hyphens in the finished eBook product, which you obviously don’t want.  Use FindàAdvanced FindàMoreàSpecialàOptional Hyphen, and replace with nothing.  As far as Track Changes goes, ensure you’ve “accepted all changes” in your document.  If you do not, the edits that are now invisible to your eyes—all your additions, deletions, etc.-- will show up in your ebook, just as if they were typed in the text.  I can’t emphasize enough the importance of these two “pre-flight” items.   

10.   Explicitly marking your scene breaks.  If you are going to use a formatting service, ensure that you explicitly mark your scene breaks.  If you haven’t been a religiously neat typist, and occasionally have extra “enters” between paragraphs, a formatter can’t infer when you want a scene break used (a flush left paragraph with vertical whitespace above it) and when you do not.  If, like some authors, you have multiple types of scenebreaks—one that uses a flush-left, and one that doesn’t, due to whether or not it’s simply a passage of time, or a POV shift—then be sure you mark them differently and explicitly.  EBook formatters don’t read your book and can’t read your mind, so be sure to tell them what you want.  At Booknook, we have our clients use the old convention of *** to indicate any scene break where they desire the visual cue of a flush-left paragraph with vertical whitespace above.  Alternatively, of course, you can use a graphical fleuron—but be aware that using fleurons requires extra coding for use in Kindle, as the e-ink devices will try to grossly enlarge them (that’s the default Kindle behavior.)  If you use a formatter, the cost will be higher; if you try to do it yourself from Word, the results, on the actual e-ink Kindles, may not be what you expect. 

11.   Broken Paragraphs:  If you’ve used any form of conversion software, (please see Tip #12, below), or perhaps typed the file on different computers, over a long stretch of time, make sure you diligently scan your document for broken pararagraphs.  If you’ve converted it from any other format, or had it scanned & OCR’d, the incidence of broken paragraphs will be quite high.  To find broken paragraphs, turn on your Pilcrow icon (if you don’t know what this is, please see my blogpost here called “Pilcrow A Go Go,” from last October), and scan the right-hand-margin.  If you see a Pilcrow mark hanging out in the right-hand margin, in the middle of what should be a paragraph, that’s a broken paragraph, and that’s the way it will convert in an eBook—as two separate paragraphs, broken right where the Pilcrow is sitting.  If you see one sitting there, highlight it and delete it, and fix any formatting around it (usually, a space is needed before the ensuing word).  For additional information on the “end of line” pilcrow problem, please see my post on “Pilcrow No-No’s, Part II,” from last November, which addresses this exact problem. 

12.   Don’t Convert!  Okay.  Here’s a tricky one.  This will sound contrary to everything you’ve read, on the KDP forums, etc.:  but don’t convert from Mystery Format A into Word.  If you have a PDF of the interior of your print book, just find a competent eBook Formatting company and hand it to them.  If you have a Wordstar File from the dawn of time, hand THAT to them.  WordPerfect?  Pretty much the same (although later Wordperfect files convert very nicely, but some don’t, and you end up with a manuscript full of “@” signs where you should see left-hand-quotes, and a host of other glitches).  We get roughly 2-4 manuscripts a week in from prospective clients that know that we have a higher charge for PDF than for Word (as do all formatters that are serious), and they’re all the result of either using Calibre, or some online “You can convert your PDF file to Word, Easy/Free/Cheap!” website.  Here’s the actual truth:  It does NOT work, not at all.  What comes out looks, on the surface, like a pretty good Word file; but lurking beneath what your eyes can see is a disaster waiting for a place to happen.  Believe it or not, it’s cheaper, in the long run, if you simply hand a PDF file to a converter, who, quite frankly, will scan it, OCR it, and proof it, just to get the same starting point as  a Word file—because the results from that are 100x better than what you’d get by using Adobe Acrobat X Pro and attempting to export the file as a Word file.  If you have an endless amount of time, and knowledge of HTML, you can use the “auto-convert” method; and spend days or weeks cleaning up the ensuing HTML.  But if you hand a file like that to a converter, like us, they’ll charge you for all those man-hours.  Honestly, the scan option is probably cheaper. 

And there you go.  An even dozen items for you to use in creating and “pre-flight checking” your book for e-formatting.  We have other frequently asked questions, along with the two videos I already pointed you to, in our Knowledgebase, which you may find by clicking here.  Not many are actually about formatting, but we do have some nice links about marketing, Retailers, and a few hints and tips on Social Media.

(And yes, for those of you who’ve emailed, tweeted, and asked:  yes, it’s true.  We have Jackie Collins in the house; you should expect to see “Chances,” her first Lucky Santangelo novel, in eBookstores around the end of the first week of June!)

Hitch
K. A. Hitchens is the owner of Booknook.biz, an eBook formatting and production company, specializing in producing affordable and professional conversions for every author--from first-timers to NY Times Bestsellers.  You can follow us at Twitter ( @BooknookBiz ), Facebook ( https://www.facebook.com/pages/Booknookbiz ), Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/booknookbiz/  ) or  LinkedIn (just search for us).

Pilcrow No-No's, Part II

When last we left off, I was rather pathetically attempting to explain the mysteries of the Pilcrow (the infamous reverse P, seen here:  ¶), and, more importantly, why being able to see it with ease matters.  A picture being worth a thousand words, let’s start with this:

A Plain Word file--looks perfectly normal, right?

 

Now, as you look at it, you’ll see that it looks perfectly normal; nothing out of the ordinary.  If Blogger will allow me to upload this in a large enough size, (It doesn't; for full-size and readable images, please see this link:  http://screencast.com/t/Hw46kxs40Npe)  the sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that something is a bit off—all the words at the beginning of each line appear to be either grammatically incorrect, or misspelled, according to Word’s built-in checker—they’re all underlined in squiggly green.

But what Word is really telling you is that the words aren't “misspelled,” per se; the problem is that they are not capitalized.  Why would Word think that they require capitalization, though?  Most of these are, to our eyes, in the midst of a sentence.  But to Word’s “eyes,” they are not in the middle of a sentence—they’re at the beginning of a new paragraph.

To see what I (and Word) mean, I’ll turn on the Pilcrow (click on the backwards P on the Word toolbar or Ribbon in the Home tab for Word 2007 and 2010) and show you what this really looks like—and what’s really encoded:

Aha!  The Culprits appear!

 

And that’s what Word sees—a page full of one-line-long paragraphs.  (Again, for a full-size image, please see this link:  http://screencast.com/t/IPUxVZmv) No wonder it thinks that all those words at the beginning of each line need capitalization!  More importantly, if you tried to reformat this manuscript—even just to type in it, what you would get would be one line that would word-wrap properly (so you’d see the teeny-weeny “dot” at the end of each line, floating directly after the last word in that line), but the rest of the sentence would end prematurely on the next line, without the wrapping carrying throughout the document, as you are accustomed to Word doing.  (In Ye Olden Times, when Dinosaurs Walked the Earth, “repagination.”).

To try to search and replace all these pilcrows is not a task for the faint of heart.  There are over 8,000 errant paragraph marks in the (from scan & OCR) document I used for this demonstration.  Having to go through your ms and search-and-replace those one at a time would be a time-consuming task, and while there are faster methods for folks with some training in html, it’s not that easy to do; after all, you can’t just tell Word to search and replace the paragraph mark with a space—or all your paragraphs will disappear, leaving you with a single, very, very long paragraph in your story.  You can’t simply tell it to search for paragraph marks surrounded by letters, either; for some of those are “real” paragraphs, as well.  However, through the simple expedient of turning on your Pilcrow, and scanning the right-hand edge of your document, you’ll at least be able to spot and identify any stragglers quickly and easily.

Hope this helped!

This post contributed by Kimberly A. Hitchens ("Hitch"), Owner and founder of Booknook.biz, one of the premiere Indy eBook production companies in North America.  

Pilcrow A-Go-Go

Or, How to Make Paragraphs Without Really Trying.

A prospective client wrote recently, inquiring about conversion services, sending first one manuscript, then, immediately upon its heels, a second, which, she asserted, she had “cleaned up” to get the best quote. I wasn’t quite sure if I’d seen her cleaned edition, so I asked her how I would recognize it—how I would distinguish it from the first. She replied: “the last one had most of the paragraph reversed P's removed.”
And I muttered to myself “OhMosesOnAPony, I certainly hope not.”

I debated upon naming this post, “Pilcrow, Friend or Foe,” because so many people seem to do battle with this wee symbol, not understanding its function in the hierarchal and layout kingdoms of word processors. The Pilcrow (etymology utterly unknown other than ME) means nothing more than “paragraph,” and for those of you who’ve never dared turn on “Show/Hide Formatting” in Word or its equivalents, looks like this:

...and all it means is that this mark distinguishes the end of one paragraph, and the beginning of the next. Simple, elegant...and utterly frustrating if you've never learned how to see it or use it.

How do you get to see this in your own documents? Simply select “Show/Hide” if you’re using Microsoft Word (click the pilcrow on the menu); “View->NonPrinting Characters” or CTRL-F10 in Open Office’s Writer program; and WordPerfect has always had Reveal Codes (and it’s probably still F3). Why do you want to see it? To save yourself hours of hair-pulling and frustration.

An excellent resource--and one I cribbed from shamelessly for this post--is this column on Paragraph Essentials from the Microsoft Office site: Paragraph Essentials. (Seriously: bookmark this article. I'm also recommending the two videos we show in our Tutorials and Videos section on our new Knowledgebase: Knowledgebase Here.) As the Microsoft article mentions, almost every document is in three major components: font, at the lowest level; paragraphs, at the core, and sections, at the top-most level. But what really drives the bus, for the vast majority of the document, is your paragraph, and its formatting. This is true whether you're using Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Open Office, or Bob's Big Boy Word Processor.
Why does the pilcrow matter? Because the magical thing about the pilcrow is this: it can make or break your formatting; it can drive you crazy or make your typing life easier; it's essential when you're formatting a book for e-publication…and here's something you mightn't know: it contains all the formatting instructions for the paragraph that comes before it. How many times have you carefully formatted a paragraph, (maybe a diary entry that your detective discovers!), getting it just right, just so, go galloping on, typing away on the next bits of dialogue-then change your mind about something, wallop the "back" key with all your might-and your precious, carefully-placed formatting on that previous paragraph disappears?
Yes-all too often, I know. I've had it happen to me, more times than I'd ever care to admit. And what about all the times you carefully formatted that epigraph, or dedication-but when it came out, the lines broke in weird places? The same thing happens when those selfsame paragraph marks are inadvertently placed at the end of a line-not a paragraph, but a line-invisibly, causing broken paragraphs, because without the pilcrow visible, if that line just happens to be roughly the same length as the other lines in your paragraph, you may never notice, until it's too late. But if you turn on the Pilcrow, you can see those errors before they ruin your painstaking efforts.
It'll take more than 500 words to explain everything that's important about seeing the codes inside your documents, so I'll stop now, strenuously recommending that you at least watch the "Video on Word Styles" in our Tutorials and Videos section of our Knowledgebase at Booknook.biz (it's not really the shameless plug it seems-someone else did the videos), and next time, I'll try to explain how ignoring the pilcrow's superpowers can break your paragraphs, your document, and your spirit.

by Kimberly Hitchens ("Hitch)--founder and owner of Booknook.biz, an ebook production company.