Saturday, July 14, 2012

More on Formatting Books with CreateSpace

       I just finished formatting for print publication "The War of the Stolen Mother," which is the first volume of my series "The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head."  I'm waiting for it to be approved.  As with all things, it continues to be a learning experience.  I thought sure that nothing would be wrong with the upload this time!  But no, there were still problems!  So I thought I would discuss the situation a little bit, since my other post, Formatting Print Books with CreateSpace, is my most popular post of all time!  It's had 83 page views, and the one on Preparing a Cover for Your CreateSpace Book has had 43.  I hope my discussions have proved useful!  I know that I myself consult them when I can't remember what I did!
Embedded fonts
       I still got that same message -- "some fonts are not embedded" -- and the display refused to show me where the problem was (I know it's supposed to).   I thought I had everything reduced to Times New Roman, Lucida Bright (which I used on the t.p. and other peripheral material), and Arial (which I used on the map).  So I checked the embedded fonts in the PDF document that I had uploaded, and it did list Garamond (can't seem to get rid of that) and Book Antigua (which I used on "Termite Queen" but didn't use here).  I had had some trouble getting the page numbers changed from TQ's Book Antigua into TNR, and now I've found a new way to check what fonts are in the document.  This is Word 2007 (I think) that I'm talking about.  Open the template document, go to the Find menu, expand to More, then click Format, and Font.  Scroll the list of fonts and find the one you're looking for, e.g. Book Antigua.  Back on the basic Find box, below the Find What bar, it will say: Format: Font: Book Antigua.  Then bring up the drop-down menu Find In, and click in turn on Main Document, Headers & Footers, and Footnotes (as appropriate).  A line will come up telling you how many times that font occurs.  They even include areas that are formatted for that font but have no text (such as a footer but no page number, or a blank header.)
       This process did show me 18 places where Book Antigua still remained.  I think they were page numbers (with numbers, the font very much resembles TNR, so it's really hard to tell the difference by just looking).  And I was able to fix everything at one swoop by using Find and Replace.  I just had it find all instances of Book Antigua and replace it with TNR.  In the same way, I simply replaced any residual Garamond with TNR (even though I'm sure they were all blank lines).
       So that fixed it, right?  No!  On the next upload it points to one place where the font is not embedded!  It was the very first line of the very first page!  That had to be a blank header!  But in the original document, that header was formatted for TNR!  The same thing happened with TQ, v.2 - it told me that half a line of text used a font that was not embedded, but there it was, big as life -- TNR!  I think their system gets a little goofy at times.
       CreateSpace will let you go ahead and approve the upload with some fonts not embedded -- they always say they will embed them for you but it could change the look of the text.  Well, it can't change the look of the text of a line with no text on it!  So I just ignored the problem. 
       But there was another problem, and it involved the map that forms the frontispiece of the book.  I'll talk about that in my next post. 

9 comments:

  1. ALl vert informative and I certainly am following you to come back when, if, I'm ready to do this myself. Thank you so much for your truly insightful, thoughtful comment on my Tree post blog. So nice, really to get real thinkers to comment:)

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  2. just a suggestion but you should maybe get a google plus following up and or linksy as well as twitter, unless I'm not seeing those there. You have potential for even bigger post hits!

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  3. Thanks for the nice words! I didn't reply quicker because I was looking over the virtual proof of "War of the Stolen Mother," and darned if I didn't find enough errors that I felt impelled to upload a corrected text! Proofing one's own works without another eye to help out is really the pits! Now I have to go through the whole review process again before I can publish!
    I'm already in Google+ (I just added you to my circle of acquaintances) Find me there as Lorinda J. Taylor. I'm not in Linksy - I'll check that out when I have time. I'm also on Facebook (not a page, just regular), Twitter (@TermiteWriter), and WANAtribe, if anybody wants to follow or friend me in any of those locations.

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  4. Thanks for more info! I formatted my son's draft on the CS template just to see how it looks. When I embed the fonts, it shows four fonts, including the one that I converted the file to. Should there be only one font? I'm thinking of retyping the whole book on the templates. Do you think that is necessary? Thank Lorinda.

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    1. If the fonts show up as embedded on the PDF, they should be OK. I think more than one will always show. You may get separate items for Italics, Bold, etc., all for the same font. And there is no need to retype the whole book on the templates, as long as you fix any formatting problems that arise when you paste in the text, for example, it might change the font or the paragraphing or the spacing or whatnot because the template uses certain defaults that may not suit your purposes. And there is always the line spacing and hyphenating of words at the ends of lines. So the whole thing does need a good proofreading before it's ready to convert to PDF and upload.

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  5. Thanks for your reply. I just looked at your books on Amazon. Your creative genius is amazing!

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    1. Gee, thank you! You COULD try purchasing one of them! :)
      I just looked at your blog! You did all that photography? Beautiful! Does your work appear on greeting cards and calendars? If not, it should! I'll bet you can make wonderful book covers!

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    2. I have planned to purchase one! But as w/anything I do, I study and study first!

      Yes, that is my photography. For the last two years, I've been editing my photos with Photoshop, sometimes adding textures. My first blog post was on creating greeting cards using Publisher. When my printer died and I couldn't decide which one to buy, I had some press printed for a church fundraiser. I don't sell them because I don't want to deal w/taxes. If you see one that would look good w/a termite, let me know and I'll send it to you. I've had two hard drive crashes so I've lost a lot of nice high resolution images.
      http://artisticexpressionsphotographync.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html
      http://artisticexpressionsphotographync.blogspot.com/2012_02_01_archive.html
      http://www.flickr.com/photos/39355011@N04/

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    3. I promise to take a better look at all your work. I don't think a termite would fit into your work, though! However, if I ever publish any of my unfinished novel, I'll need a different sort of cover, since it's about humans (which I can't draw) and bird aliens, not termites! Maybe you could do something for me! But that's pretty far in the future!

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