The Trouble With Text Boxes 18th December 2010.

Now, we all know, or should know by now, when we’re writing we avoid certain of Word’s little gizmos that are designed to help presentation material, sales literature or simply jazz up a business document.

There are loads of these, but the last thing a publisher needs is for an author to include them in a manuscript. Some are obvious, watermarks, document papers (i.e. backgrounds) and colourful ornaments of any type.

These obvious ones are very easy to spot, and essentially easy to deal with, preferably by the author, if necessary by the poor sap art the publisher who has to format these books into e-books. On our case, that poor sap, in case you haven’t realised it is of course me.

The less obvious ones are more difficult to track down, especially as for some of them Word doesn’t provide you with a mechanism to jump to them. One of these is a pesky little devil called a text box.

I have spent a fairly fruitless afternoon attempting to upload a 120,000 word book to one of our wholesalers, and each time their autovetter (the program that checks the uploaded book) rejects it because there is a text box in the document.

Now, in a presentation document you use a text box for all sorts of things, but unless it’s a heavily formatted illustrated book, it’s not something you would use, and if it is, there are other alternatives – mainly to using Word in the first place!

The autovetter doesn’t like it, because it would play havoc with the e-book formatting, essentially destroying the formatting in extreme cases. The problem is this particular autovetter doesn’t tell me where the problem is in the book – which is why I’ve had to parse through it so many times in fruitless attempts to locate the “wavy grey line” that is the only indication Word will give you that the box actually exists.

Can I find it?

Can I hell as like.

Have you ever tried to read through a 250 page book at speed, five or six times one after the other?

I have, and believe you me; it’s not something you want to try.

In near desperation I’ve called their customer support team for any clues, especially as I’ve now checked every version of the book we do and there is no hint of any formatting issue in any version.

Of course, it’s the weekend, so that’s another job that’ll get put on the back burner till Monday.

Damn it!