So after the day before yesterday’s MS Word fiasco, which as of yesterday morning I thought would be relatively easy to clean up, I spent the entire day wrestling with the damn file!!!!
Copying the 325 pages out of the corrupted file and pasting it into an identical Wyrd template caused the copy to lose its styling. The format looked right: 20 point Alegreya bold level 2 heading, 0 points before, 30 points after…but Wyrd would not read it so! Word, in effect, could not “see” the styles for chapter headings, paragraphs, font format, etc.
It converted all the small-caps first-graf leaders into all caps. Normally you can search > format > all caps and replace with format > small caps. But in this file, Wyrd would not do that. Because, as it developed, the program “thought” the all-caps were small-caps. So I had to go through the entire file, paragraph by paragraph, and manually change every set of all caps to small caps. This took hours of mindless pointing and clicking and pointing and clicking and pointing and…. God DAMN but I hate it that Apple negated all of Word’s keyboard commands!!!!
The “format paintbrush” didn’t work for the purpose. So, no. There was no way out of the endless point-and-click torture.
Lines wrapped slightly differently in the new file, so I had to go through the entire document again (each of these stages happens one at a time) to fix a whole new raft of widows, orphans, and loose lines. Hours of farting around.
And of course, because rewrapped lines changed the pagination, I had to go through the entire document and replace every page break (each of which was placed where it worked) with a section break/odd page, with baleful ramifications.
Changing the page breaks to section breaks re-fucked up the pagination. So I had to wrestle with the program some more to persuade it to start the roman-numeral pagination on page one, not to put a page number on chapter and section opening pages, and not to give me two roman-numeral sections each starting on page i.
Because Wyrd blocks the view of a blank page after a section break/odd when you’re in View > Print Layout, I can’t get AT the verso side of those pages to hide the running header, so when the damn thing is printed, it will (once again) look like some lady with a typewriter on her kitchen table composed it. I In “Draft,” you can’t see the headers & footers, so obviously you can’t get into them to fool with covering up the ones you don’t want to print.
T0 fix this, I’ll have to go through every section and change the section breaks to page breaks, fix the headers, and change the page breaks back to section breaks. Then I’ll have to go through all 325 pages, one at a time, and reformat all the sections to the custom format I had to make to create a PDF that tells the printer to print it on 8.5 x 9.5 stock.
Because Wyrd couldn’t read the heading style, it wouldn’t generate a new table of contents. So I had to go through, identify page numbers for every chapter, and create a new TofC. That sounds easy, but it wasn’t, because of the native squirreliness of Word tables. It was, as a matter of fact, an endless effing nightmare.
So I’m not done with a project that should’ve been done a week ago. And I hate Word. I’m beginning to hate Word enough that it just might be worth trying, for the fourth time, to learn how to use InDesign.
No, wait: I see the workaround: Enter a page break before the section break. This will push the section break to the verso side, preserving the section’s formatting. Obscure the running header at the top of the blank page and then delete the page break.
Why should I have to dream up stuff like this? Why should I have to waste my time like this to get what ought to be a simple job done?