Can You Typeset
Your Book Using MS Word?
by Walt Shiel
The short answer is…yes, of course. However, there are
numerous cautions you really need to understand. Although Microsoft
Word is a great word processing program (although not necessarily the
best and certainly not the least expensive), it is a mediocre book
layout and typesetting program.
The first caution is that, regardless of the software
tool you use, you must take some time to study typesetting and its
“rules.” Sure, rules can be stretched and even broken, but if you don’t
understand them, you won’t realize when you’re making amateurish
mistakes. There are several excellent books on the subject of
typography. Two excellent ones are:
The Complete Manual of
Typography by James Felici
The Elements of
Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
Felici’s book is an easier read with less esoteric
background information. Bringhurst’s book is more suitable for those
who really want to understand why professional typographers do things
the way they do and how the common rules and standards have evolved (he
does, however, tend to cling to some “rules” that are far from standard
practice today). You can probably find at least one of these books in
your local library, although I think Felici’s book would be a great
addition to your publishing library and one to which you will likely
refer regularly.
Another really important caution concerning MS Word as a
typesetting tool is that you’re going to have to delve deeply into its
options and preferences to make it yield a final product even close to
a professionally typeset book. Why? Because Word’s default settings
simply will not do the job.
Here are just a few examples of Word’s poor default
settings:
Font (more
properly called typeface) –
Times New Roman is a really poor choice for a printed book (it was
designed for the narrow columns of a newspaper, but even they rarely
use it anymore), it’s too narrow and thin and is particularly poor when
printed digitally (like all the print-on-demand book printers). And
it’s default 10 pt size is probably going to be too small.
Hyphenation
Word’s default settings tend to result in too many words split at the
end of lines, which quickly becomes annoying to a reader (even if they
don’t recognize why they’re finding it annoying).
Letter Spacing
Although Word can adjust spacing between letters on-the-fly to achieve
your settings for hyphenation and such, it only does it on a
line-by-line basis. Professional typesetting programs do this on a
paragraph basis, scanning back to previous lines in the paragraph to
make minute adjustments that will help with the rest of the paragraph.
The result of those last two problems (hyphenation and
letter spacing) is that paragraphs tend to develop what are called
“rivers of white” running through them, something that professional
typesetting software rarely produces. You can make manual adjustments
to correct that problem by inserting optional hyphens and/or soft line
breaks, but it can become tedious. (Even with professional software, I
always go through the completed book looking for those rivers…but
almost never find them.)
If your book is almost exclusively text (like a novel,
for example), you can make MS Word suffice, but not until you study one
of the books on typography and then experiment with it. If your book
has more than a few graphics of any kind (or tables or charts, for that
matter), you will soon find some of Word’s little idiosyncrasies
frustrating.
For most books, you may find that you are ahead of the
game by paying a professional to do the layout and typesetting. Yes, it
will cost you — usually in the hundreds of dollars (but could easily
exceed $1,000). You will have a more professional product (that will
enhance the reader’s experience rather than detract from it) and will
have saved yourself a lot of time and headaches. I know, I typeset one
novel using MS Word (hey, many of us have to learn the hard way) and
vowed never to do it again. Before tackling the next book, I spent the
time to read and study typography and book design best-practices and
then spent a few months learning to use Adobe InDesign (a phenomenal
typesetting and layout program that is just about the industry standard
now).
If you really must typeset your book yourself using MS
Word, please buy and study Aaron Shepard’s bible on the subject —
Perfect Pages — as you will save yourself a lot of false starts. I know
and respect Aaron and his expertise, but I don’t agree with him that
most people can get professional results from MS Word. But, if you
insist, please do follow his advice.
The real answer to the question of whether MS Word is a
satisfactory solution for typesetting and layout of a book is that it
depends on:
As always, the choice is yours. Just make certain you
understand the ramifications of that choice.
One more reason to use great care when typesetting your
book for print using Word is that you just might drive up the cost of
turning it into a well-structured and reader-friendly e-book. Word adds
a lot of extraneous codes, even more if you don’t use its styles
feature with caution and a lot of preparatory planning.
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