Book Design with Microsoft Word: The Art of Moriah Jovan. I bet, like me, you’ve been using Microsoft Word for years. One of the most common complaints you hear from professional book designers, cover designers, typographers, and some self-publishers is that you can’t create a “real” book in a word processing program like Microsoft Word. I’ve taken a few of those shots myself. There is another camp of do-it-yourself self publishers who wouldn’t use anything else. Either Word or the open source program Open Office are their preferred tools. They eliminate book designers and typographic design because they view them as unnecessary expenses. I think some of these publishers go overboard. But quietly, under the radar, at least one author who uses Word but also loves typography was out there.
Today you’re going to meet her, Elizabeth Beeton of B10Mediaworx, who writes and publishes under the name Moriah Jovan. The Design Review of “Stay” Click to enlarge. I was surprised at how good the book looked, since I’ve seen a lot of DIY self publishing. How-To Create Booklets Using Microsoft Word 2010. Whether you are working on a school project or creating advertising materials, a decent booklet can come in handy and inspire the wow factor with the un-groovy! Using Microsoft Word 2010, you can create professional looking booklets and print them out yourself (assuming you have a decent printer) with just a few simple clicks. It’s that simple. Honestly, the only real work is coming up with the content as Word will automatically print each page in the correct order on the correct placement on the paper. Before you get booklet fever and go on a creative spree, first we need to set up the page layout.
Using booklet mode, Word 2010 will essentially shrink each page as if it’s being folded in half. We’ll talk more about the layout in step 3 below. How-To Create Booklets Using Microsoft Word 2010 1. 2. 3. 4. Now you can continue adding pages and design your booklet to be as large as you like! Questions, Comments?
So You Want to Write a Book in Word. So You Want to Write a Book With MS Word. • Click for No-Frames Version with Internal Navigation Links • If you intend to assemble and manipulate large amounts of text in Word and would like to minimize the time you spend fighting Word, it’s a good idea to have an understanding of how Word works. If you are hoping for an easy template for a book, you should realize that there is no such single item. There are as many potential templates as there are books. However, if you format your text according to the structure of your book, following the principles introduced and linked here, you can plug the same text into any template to control the visual appearance, and reformat and reorganize your entire book very quickly.
This webpage will also point you toward how to set up Word to write a book, a dissertation, or other long document projects that require multiple chapters. The title of this article refers to “books,” but these are principles that apply to many types of long documents. Is This the Right Article for You? How Word Thinks. Layout Planning.
By Klaus Linke Reproduced from a newsgroup post, by permission of the author It may help to figure out the book's format (say size, portrait versus landscape, available margins, etc.) fairly early on, since it can have a big impact on how you'll organize your text, graphics, tables, etc. If you don’t yet have a publisher, look at already published books of similar topics and functions to get a sense of the possibilities. Questions to consider: How much text, roughly, will fit on one page? If I have very few headings (many pages apart), can I help readers orient themselves with column headings, or chapter numbers/logos/watermarks? Can the text flow freely from page to page?
It happens all the time that… Some Word manuscript that was planned for a certain number of pages, but with fixed layout, will turn out to be 30% too long a week before printing, and will have to be re-edited on short notice. Setting Up Word. Or, How to Stop Word From Being So "Helpful"! Everyone complains about Word having a mind of its own. Before you start working, spend 5-10 minutes going through these three dialogs to turn off some of Word’s automation and set some controls the way you prefer. Tools>AutoCorrect, all tabs Tools>Options, all tabs (on a Mac: Word>Preferences) Tools>Customize, Options tab You’ll find more information below.
Explore the dialogs and experiment with the settings. This page doesn't tell you what the "correct settings" are, because many of the settings are a matter of personal preference and dependent on the way you use Word. Where webpages exist that give more information about these dialogs, I’ve added links below. 1. In particular, the AutoFormat As You Type tab is the source of the auto-numbering and the lines you can’t get rid of. More Information: 2. Mac users: this dialog is the same as the Word>Preferences dialog.
What the Save Options Mean (or, There is no AutoSave in Word) 3. How Word differs from WordPerfect.