In an earlier post, I commented on having problems with corrupted files, which I concluded were due to (a) a trojan which infected my computer last winter and possibly infected my Word 2007 templates, or (b) my own fault due to editing a document on a flash drive (which is bad because the drive gets all screwed up as the file continues to expand).
Well, it happened again today. The row of little black boxes showed up as I typed into the "Dreamer" sequel manuscript. I'm now into chapter 4 and I sure did not want to go back and create another new document. So I did some web searching. First I found a number of places that will let you buy software to correct the problem. THESE MAY BE A SCAM BASED ON WHAT I FOUND OUT NEXT!
What actually was happening is something that is built into Microsoft Word. When you type three or more hyphens, underscores, hash signs, asterisks, and then press Enter, unless you change a default setting, Word applies an automatic border to the paragraph before it. My publisher, and I assume others, requests using three asterisks centered in a line to indicate a scene break because many of the programs used to publish ebooks will drop the break if it is only white space. By resetting the Autoformat as you Type defaults, you can prevent this from happening entirely; there is a setting for creating bottom borders. To get rid of the boxes, just select the paragraph above and below where the boxes appear and then select "no borders." Voila! Boxes gone! And it didn't cost a thing.
Similar conditions apply to earlier versions of Word. Here is the website where I found this so you can find the details:
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/CantGetRidOfLineContent.htm
I wanted to spread the word to all other writers using Word to not jump in and buy some "solution" which will most likely simply copy your file to a format which does not retain formatting and then have you copy it back and manually reset your lost formats. By all means, try this solution first!
No comments:
Post a Comment