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.