Adventures in Typesetting, Part 1

A task I undertook a while back was typesetting my (still-upcoming) book, Shatternity: Origins. This post is not really about the book but rather the process of editing and typesetting it. For this article I will focus specifically on the use of styles.

Going in, I had no knowledge of typesetting. I’d taken word-processing courses over the years and I know my way around Word and OpenOffice. I can usually figure things out when I need to. However, I’d never taken a stab at typesetting a novel into a format appropriate for publishing. Since I intend to self-publish this volume (a separate article altogether), it was up to me to make sure the finished product was slick and professional. So, I am going to attack the various details that came up in the process of typesetting this book. I hope these tips are of use to you, the amateur typesetter and self-publisher.

To start with, I’ll assume you’re using version 3 of OpenOffice Writer. If you’re using Word, the same features should exist but will be in other places. If this article gets a decent amount of attention I might consider writing a Word version of it, too. In the meantime, though, let’s just go with OpenOffice. Now, on with the details!

Widows and Orphans

First, you need to know what widows and orphans are in a publishing context. A widow is what you call the final sentence of a paragraph when it reaches the following page, leaving part or all of that sentence by itself on the page. An orphan is the same basic idea but regards the opening sentence of a paragraph. Both of these are ugly and should be avoided. Luckily, OpenOffice provides a way to control this.

Before we go any further, you’ll need to know about OpenOffice’s style features. Instead of manually adjusting font sizes and formatting every time you want to do a chapter heading or a subtitle or body text, you should define styles. You should see a bar just above the ruler or a floating toolbox named “Styles and Formatting” with items named things like “Heading 1,” “Text body,” etc. Each of these is a style. If you don’t see the “Styles and Formatting” box, click the button all the way to the left of the style toolbar. This will bring up said box. Then, right-click one of the styles–preferably “Default”–and pick “Modify…” This brings up the “Paragraph Style” menu.

Next, click the tab marked “Text Flow.” You will see many options, but here we want to worry about “Orphan control” and “Widow control,” which are the two options at the bottom. Set both to at least 2 lines. That should be sufficient for avoiding orphans and widows. Note that you’ll still want to visually check your document for them later, in case any were missed, but this option will thwart most offenses.

Styles

Now that you’ve done a little bit of modification to a style, you’re probably interested in what else is possible. For the time being, make sure you’ve selected “Paragraph Styles” in the “Styles and Formatting” box. This is the button in the upper left with the traditional paragraph symbol on it. (There are styles for pages and other things, but we’ll only worry about paragraphs for now.) You can think of each style as a paragraph template. You can control numerous settings including the font, text size, kerning, indentation, alignment, hyphenation, drop caps, and many other options. For a no-frills novel, you’ll at least want to define styles for body text and chapter titles. To apply a style, simply select the text you want to style and then double-click the appropriate style in the “Styles and Formatting” box. You can define as many styles as you want, just keep in mind that any styles you’ll use for your body text should have widow and orphan control enabled.

While you should feel free to tweak styles to your liking, don’t get carried away turning on all the special effects and features. You want your book to have a clean, polished look, free of things that distract from what’s important: the actual text of your novel! For body text, use a sensible serif typeface with a point size of 10-14. For chapter titles and subtitles you can certainly be more expressive, just try to be consistent. There may also be times you want to use a special style for effect, such as a script font to represent the text of a written letter. These sorts of decisions are up to you but remember not to get carried away.

Page Numbers

Good luck getting by without page numbers! But I’ll make it easy for you. Books in general have special requirements when it comes to page numbering, which include:

  * Not numbering every page (such as the inside cover and title pages.)
  * Skipping numbers on some pages (again, such as the inside cover and title pages.)
  * Multiple numbering schemes (for instance, using Roman numerals for a preface and Arabic numerals for everything else.)

All these things can be taken care of without too much difficulty if you know where to look. It is not very obvious but you can find these things in the Insert menu, under Fields. First, however, you will need to work with styles again. This time, in the “Styles and Formatting” box, click the fourth button from the left, which looks like a page. This changes your view to consist of page styles rather than paragraph styles. You’ll need to create one page style for each page numbering scenario.

First, let’s create one for pages we don’t want to be numbered. In the “Styles and Formatting” box, right-click in an empty area and pick “New…” This will let you create a new style, naturally. The style dialog will come up. Name this style “Not Numbered.” Go to the “Page” tab and make sure “Page layout” is set to “Mirrored.” Click the “OK” button.

Now, let’s assume you have a preface or some other section you wish to number with Roman numerals. Create a new style and call it “Preface.” Go to the “Header” tab and check “Header On.” Go to the “Footer” tab and check both “Footer On” and “Same content left/right.” The latter option ensures that both left and right pages will be numbered. Go to the “Page” tab and make sure “Page layout” is set to “Mirrored.” Click the “OK” button.

Finally, let’s make our “normal” page style that will be used for the bulk of the book. Create one more style and call it “Default” or something easy to remember. Go to the “Header” tab and check “Header On.” Go to the “Footer” tab and check both “Footer On” and “Same content left/right.” Go to the “Page” tab and make sure “Page layout” is set to “Mirrored.“ This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, there is a method to our madness. Click the “OK” button.

We are at last ready to style our book! We have three page styles to work with. Go to the very first page, then double-click “Not Numbered” in your “Styles and Formatting” box. This will apply the “Not Numbered” style to both the current page and all subsequent pages. Next, go to the last page before your preface. Go to “Insert” and click “Manual Break…” You want it to be a “Page break.” From the “Style” dropdown menu, pick “Preface.” All pages after this break will use the “Preface” style! Click the “OK” button.

You’ll want to insert page numbers into your preface now, right? Here’s where the fields come in. Click the footer box at the bottom of the first page of your preface. Click “Insert,” then “Fields,” then “Other…” Make sure you are on the “Document” tab and that you’ve selected the “Page” type. You’ll see that the center box has an option for “Page numbers.” Select that and then in the right box will be a list of page number formats. Pick whichever you prefer, then click “Insert.” For the duration of this page style, that type of numbering will be used. As a bonus, since you reset the style, the numbers will start from 1. Click “Close” once you’ve inserted your numbers.

Naturally, you don’t want Roman numerals on all your pages, just those of the preface. So, do what you did before: go to the last page of your preface, click after the end of its text but before the first page of the novel proper, and insert a manual break. Select “Default” or whatever you called your body text style from the “Style” dropdown. Once again, all subsequent pages will be assigned the new style. To insert page numbers, repeat the same drill with “Insert,” “Fields,” and “Other…” Once you’ve done this, you’ll have applied three distinct page styles: one without numbers, one with Roman numerals, and one with Arabic numerals. Good work!

Headers

It’s also customary to have your book’s title and your name as a header. Typically, the book’s title goes on the right-hand pages and your name goes on the left-hand pages. To insert these titles, click in the header box at the top of one the pages of your novel proper (not the title pages or preface) and type in your name or the title of the book. Since we’re not showing the same thing on the left and right pages, you’ll need to insert two headers: one with your name, and one with the book’s title. Once you have done that, the alternating name/title headers should appear on all subsequent pages. To get the cool “small capitals” effect normally used for these sorts of headers, create a new paragraph style and go to the “Font Effects” tab, selecting “Small capitals” from the “Effects” dropdown list. Apply this style to both the right and left headers! You need only do this once for each header for it to be applied to the rest of the book.

With the above items out of the way, we’ve taken care of styling the book. If there is a positive response to this article I will cover things like margins and gutters next, though those aren’t nearly as daunting as learning how to style!