[bksvol-discuss] Re: The case of the proliferating page breaks
- From: Mike <mlsestak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2011 22:46:11 -0700
Judy and Kim,
Just about a year ago I found a way to strip all the styles out of a
file if you are using Word 2003 or earlier (it can also be done for Word
2007 and 2010 and the process is similar but I don't quite have a
keyboard only, no mouse click version written down. If someone really
needs that, I'll try to figure it out). Here is my email from back then ...
Woohoo! I have found out how to remove all styles from a MS Word
document. As well as I can I will give instructions for both unsighted
and sighted (this is not guaranteed to work in Word 2007, but it should
work in all earlier versions) ...
Select the tools menu (alt-t)
Go down (arrow down) to Templates and add-ins (yeah really intuitive, no
wonder no one found it before)
Select or hit enter, this opens a dialog box which can pretty much be
ignored
Select the organize button (alt-o)
This opens another dialog box (more fun all the time)
This dialog has several tabs, but the one it opens to by default
(Styles, hey that sounds useful) is the one we want
This dialog has two list boxex one on the left, one on the left and one
on the right, and other text boxes and buttons. Right now we are only
interested on the list box on the left, it is a list of all the styles
in the current document.
Select the first item in the list box on the left (tab and then arrow
down once)
Now select all the items in the list box (shift-end is the easiest for
everyone to do this step)
Now select the delete button (alt-d)
You will now get a dialog that starts Do you want to delete (and then
gives the name of the first style)
Select the Yes to All button (tab, then enter or alt-a)
Now you will get several dialogs that say cannot delete default style
normal or whatever. Just hit enter for ok to all of them.
When all those dialogs are gone, so are all those extraneous styles.
On the general topic of removing unnecessary formatting by selecting the
entire document and using the paragraph dialog, you can set both left
and right indentation to 0, set before and after spacing to 0, set line
spacing to single and special to none. You can go into page setup and
set the margins to 0.3 for top, bottom, left and right (Word often
complains about putting in 0 for margins because it knows most printers
can't actually print to the margin, but 0.3 seems to work with every
printer I've ever had). If there are still extra soft page breaks you
can set the font size to something less than 12 (once it is converted at
bookshare any font 12 point or less is all treated the same anyway).
Finally, if they are really all soft page breaks, the bookshare
conversion tools are supposed to not be affected by them anyway, so you
can just ignore them rather than doing all the stuff given above..
Misha
On 8/1/2011 8:28 PM, Judy s. wrote:
Kim,
I don't know if this is the case for your document, but if the
document was creating using different styles (using the styles
settings in Word), then global replaces and global paragraph
formatting changes may not work. The styles command seems, in my
experience at least, to freeze certain things so that global changes
that are done after the styles are set do not affect all the text..
For example, I'm proofing a book right now that has a 'style' that
gets invoked when the font is supposed to change to bold, instead of
the text just being changed by formatting codes to bold. I can not
select those sections of text combined with any other sections of text
and then do a global 'unbold' -- it won't work. Instead, I have to
select just the text that is bolded by that specific style sheet it is
calling to make any changes in it's format. It's a total pain in the
rump as this books has, so far, over 77 different style settings that
it's invoking!
If that's what's going on with your book, then I don't have any
solutions--just an explanation of what's going on.
I haven't found a way to strip out all the style sheet stuff that
leaves in all my page breaks, so if anyone knows how to do this I'd be
grateful!
Judy
Kim Friedman wrote:
Hi, I'm working on a document which is kind of peculiar. First of all,
the submitter set the whole thing to custom size (22 inches by 8.5
inches) and the paragraph presentation was set to the usual standard as
mentioned for optimum proofreading. Even though this was apparently the
case, the document when opened in Word 2003 said the file had 256 pages
when the actual page count in the book is 216 pages. I followed this
procedure: 1. Selected the entire document which took me to the bottom
of the file: 2. Entered the format menu and selected the paragraph
settings. My question is how is it possible for one to get into the
paragraph settings and somehow deselect the document so that one isn't
getting the whole file set correctly? I was under the impression when
one selected the entire document and went into the paragraph
presentation dialog boxes that whatever changes one made was supposed to
affect the whole document and not have the internal pages set
differently from what it's supposed to be. Is there some settings in
Word which are configured wrong or is it some peculiarity of the
scanning program or OCR which has messed up this pagination so this
proliferating page break situation occurs? I consulted with Rick Costa
who had the file in front of him. I was told that about ten percent of
the document must have a lot of white space which seemed to cause the
huge amount of page breaks. He is also curious to know if the screen
reader affects the file in any way. I don't think this is so just
because its job is simply to read what is on the monitor screen. I don't
see how an .rtf file or it's opening in MS Word should affect it. I also
don't see why going into the paragraph presentation in the formatting
menu should deselect what was selected. Do any of you know? This would
be very helpful to submitters who turn in files and it would also help
proofreaders who come across this proliferating page break phenomenon.
Regards, Kim Friedman. P.S.: The book I'm working on is Scales of
Retribution by Cora Harrison. (It is the sixth installment of the Burren
mystery series by her.) K.
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