“Typesetting” in Microsoft Word →
Having hopes is healthy. They can act as a motivator to reach your goals, a psychological stress-release valve, or even just an idle daydream. I hope that I win the EuroMillions lottery, that my MacBook will spontaneously sprout an i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM, that I’ll find the secret of eternal youth, and become the greatest thinker in the history of the human race. Like I said, hopes are good, but it’s also important to realise that not all hopes are realistic.
Take, as an example of this, Jack M. Lyon in the aforelinked:
[I]t would be great if you could do professional-quality typesetting in nothing but [Microsoft] Word. The truth is, you can, if you know how. And in this article, I hope to teach you most of what you’ll need.
In the former sentence, he’s absolutely right: it would be great if you could use Word to produce professional-quality typesetting. Just think of the money you’d save on a typesetter, and the control you’d have — almost end-to-end, barring only the printing itself. And using a piece of software you already have on your machine, requiring practically no learning! It would be wonderful.
Unfortunately, despite Lyon claiming that “[t]he truth is, you can”, it’s completely untrue. You can’t. You can compose a primitive layout in Word, but you can’t typeset in Word. It’s a small distinction, but an important one.
Typesetting is more than just “things like typographical dashes and quotation marks”. Running a few search and replace functions for “curly quotes” and en-dashes will not make your manuscript “look professionally typeset already”; it will merely make it look less shit. (And if you’re using any version of Word released in the last decade, these settings should be on by default.)
To do it right, typesetting requires microscopic levels of control: the ability to adjust the of kerning single words, or even a single character; proper, real hypenation; ligatures beyond just “ff” and “fi”1; proper control over leading; old-style figures; &c., &c., &c. ad nauseum.
Using the proper software, a lot of this can be automated. But this is because the software was specifically designed to do these things. Word isn’t designed to do any of these things. Sometimes, you can hack them into your manuscript, but that is not the same as baked-in support for them. An ugly hack will always be an ugly hack.2
Ultimately, it comes down to respecting your audience: if you want them to pay for your book, then make something worth paying for — set it using the right tools, to produce the very best product you can. If you can’t do it yourself, get someone who can to do it for you. Don’t give in to the craft-stall mentality and be a lazy, cheap arsehole about it; either do it right, or don’t bother doing it at all.3
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The number of ligatures alone is terrifying, without even beginning to think about which ones you need to use. ↩
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In my second-to-last year at Uni, I tried to set my essays in Word, mainly out of a desire to turn in beautiful-looking essays. Even using fonts with full character sets, it was hell. I had to search and replace all the ligatures I wanted, and then carefully check over the entire document to ensure that the linebreaks weren’t in the middle of words. Word treats “suffer” as two words — “suff” and “er”, and, if it came near the end of a line, would put the “suff” on one line, and the “er” on the next. That’s just one of the many irritating problems I had to deal with whilst trying to “typeset” my essays. ↩
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One thing my father always says to me is “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right”. He’s a fount of such useful sayings, but this is the one that sticks with me the most. ↩
Notes
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Having hopes is healthy. They can act as a motivator...reach your goals, a psychological...
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