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Monday 12 June 2017

It was Broadside vs. Developing The Portable Wargame ... and the latter won!

It was my original intention to go to BROADSIDE in Sittingbourne yesterday ... but I never quite made it.

Over the past few days Arthur Harman had been diligently going through the printed proof copy of the book, and had found a few minor things that needed to be changed. I made the changes yesterday morning, and uploaded the files to Lulu.com. I made one final check of the three versions ... and discovered that the eBook version had some really glaring format problems.

For some reason certain paragraphs had – apparently at random – been capitalised and/or changed font and/or changed font size. This had happened before, and I went through the original file, made what I thought were the necessary changes, and uploaded the new file.

The faults were still there.

By this time I was determined to sort the problem out. All thoughts of going to BROADSIDE went out the window; I had a problem that I was determined to beat. I retyped the offending passages ... and that didn't work. I went through and reformated various parts of the file ... and that didn't work either. In the end, after eight attempts to cure the problem, I gave up ... by which time it was the early evening.

Overnight I tried not to think about what was causing the problems, and when I woke up this morning I was determined to find a solution.

After several attempts I found it. The formatting problem was being caused by my use of bullet points! Apparently these can generate format changes when the MS Word Docx file is converted into ePub format. The changes are not consistent and do not appear to follow a regular pattern, which is why the problem was so hard to cure.

The new file has been uploaded, and as far as I can see the formatting problems have gone. I'm now going to leave everything to settle down for a day or so, and perhaps then I might actually be able to draw a line under this project and publish my latest book!

4 comments:

  1. At Broadside, Brigade Models had many of their Chatham Dockyard models finished but are still working on a model of Upnor Castle.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nigel Drury,

      I didn't know that Brigade Models were making models of the Medway-based military buildings. I would have been interested to see them.

      All the best,

      Bob

      Delete
    2. They've done most of this - http://www.brigademodels.co.uk/Blog/2017/05/dockyard-extension/

      and have added some other dockyard models, also the Medway island forts of Hoo and Darnet.

      Delete
    3. Nigel Drury,

      Thanks for the link. It looks like being an interesting range of models.

      All the best,

      Bob

      Delete

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