Double L meant double hell 14th December 2010.

I guess taking the time out from wring this blog in order to complete my double NANO challenge was a mistake – I don’t seem to have managed to get back into the swing of it since. Apologies to those few poor tortured souls who have been tuning in regularly to be faced with no fix for their addiction.

Anyway, on to the point for today. I had a really weird conversion problem last night, something of a seriously disturbing nature which I’ve never come across before. All revolving around the use of words containing a double L.

When a finished manuscript lands on my laptop from the editing team I have a lot of work to do in terms of formatting, adding copyright pages, dedications, biographies, cover images and so on. As well as to ensure the formatting meets all the input needs for all the conversion programs I subsequently have to use.

Then when the book is finally finished it’s time to fire up the convertors, you’d think one at a time, but in fact I have to produce two different versions of the Acrobat format and no less than three different versions of the Kindle format (due to the different security settings needed by different wholesalers!). Then it’s over to “old trusty” the 6 year old desktop machine that’s the only one that will run the Microsoft Reader conversion software before settling down in front of the third screen of the day to run the Epub conversion suite which takes as its input one of the Acrobat files rather than the Word file.

This final conversion involves a pair of programs since the converter will not allow you to edit the resulting file and has mangled the formatting, so you have to go in and edit the file to reinstate said formatting. This is where the problem came in. When parsing down the file I started noticing some odd spelling issues suddenly cropping up, ones there was no way our editors had missed, let alone our author had perpetrated.

Every single double L in the document had been changed to an L and a space. Since the main character’s name was Chelle this was a bit of a problem as it had become Chel e everywhere. As had every other word containing a double L.

The editor I have to use to work on an Epub file, doesn’t like long (novel-length) documents so won’t do find and replace all on them, besides I’m sure the author and readers would be up in arms with fruitfull rather than fruitful etc, etc, if I did a full mass replace. Do you know just how many words there are with a double L in them? It seems especially true of a Canadian author, but that’s another issue and I’m sure she will read this and know I’m joking. (Ed – He hopes!)

It took several hours of trying things, all to no avail before I tried something off the wall. I went back to the original Word document, did a find replace there for double L and replaced all 3409 occurrences with double L, reconverted to Acrobat, then reconverted to Epub.

Lo and behold it worked.

How bizarre is that?

Answers on a postcard...