Office Open XML – Jaye Em Edgecliff

No matter how hard we try there’s always something in our final, published to the public, books that is just plain wrong.

Today I noticed three.

The first came from the beautiful (truly, these are just stunning) print copies of Love or Lust that arrived today: in the print version there’s a blank page between chapters 20 and 21. It’s not there in the .docx file. It’s a quirk of converting to PDF – something I had to do to get the very pretty fonts for the title page, headers, and chapter names.

The second was a sudden realisation: I was using a draft copy of the copyright notice where I hadn’t made a final decision about the art yet! I hadn’t listed the very talented photographer who’d taken that picture as I ought’ve. This has been remedied. Very sorry Oteo.

Finally, despite, I swear, copying and pasting the name from their website since I can’t bloody spell it to save my life, I still had Juilliard misspelt in all three places I refer to it ~head hung in shame~. I have now added the first i to the word.

Let it never be said that publishing, in any regard, isn’t an adventure.

Attempt at Political Satire? (thepolarzone.wordpress.com)
Juilliard School of Music Performances and Events (local.answers.com)
Pithy Tarot meanings – King of Wands (jamesricklef.wordpress.com)
Set Up To Fail – Why You Should Avoid Credit Counseling (debtconsolidationusa.com)
The Other Side (authortlgray.wordpress.com)

So I’ve found exactly one reason to use Microsoft’s Office program Word. If it’s possible to have headers and footers that are different on one set of pages, or even a single page, than the rest of the document — including restarting page number count — in Pages, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Abiword, and others I’ve never found it.

I did a lot of my typing of both Love or Lust and Ready or Not at work where I can’t use Pages (thank you Apple for Pages on iCloud coming soon), anyway, but normally I would just open them in Pages at home and Word at work and not worry about odd little artifacts creeping in until the final version. Sadly I thought I had got to the final version before I noticed I’d missed some serious typos. Well, by then I need to keep the .DOCX file unsullied for my CreateSpace print edition (the whole reason to need the variable footers & headers settings).

Well, to keep to my editing schedule I’ve installed Office 2011 on my Mac so I might work on my days off instead of just at work (my original plan for dealing with this unexpected extra proofreading run). I must say, as much as I detest the Office 2010 at work for being unintuitive and horribly lacking in any aesthetics to speak of (very awesome icon, and far cooler than any Windows version I’ve ever encountered, but that’s about it). I’ll grant, though, that the reviews saying it’s infinitely stabler, smaller, faster, and generally a better program on Mac than on Windows is quite true. It certainly is much more usable on the Mac than on the PC, but Pages is, with the aforementioned exception, infinitely more so. Suffice to say, unlike previous situations where I was able to obtain legitimate free copies of their software or OS when I felt that I had overpaid, I think that I paid a fair price by getting it Free. I might even have, had there been a trial version to check it out first, have paid as much as us$5 or so for it. I think, though, I’m far happier with the $20 for Pages (in fact, I’d gladly have paid the full us$79 that it was back under the iWork ’09 name and still called it a bargain).

For those looking for word processing that gets out of the way, lets you get the job done, look at Pages. If you need to do weird, esoteric things to the document — export it as a Word file from the file menu then go to work or visit a friend or get to Kinkos or something where you can open it in Word to do the weird esoteric thing to it before upload or printing.