In a recent post, I wrote about my search for a screen capture app and showed you two short videos I made using Bandicam. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that I was not using a free app. I was using a demo version with severe limitations. I was tempted to buy the app, but the price was a little too high for my liking.
After some more searching, I discovered RecMaster which combines dead easy screen capture with a [very] basic video editor. I bought a year’s subscription for $19.99 USD and made a video…but when I inserted it into this post, I was horrified by how hard it was to read!
The problem is two fold. First, the default Windows fonts used in titles and menus are so small that when you reduce them even further to a standard video format, they become impossible to read. Then I discovered that WordPress makes them even smaller. Vimeo does have a fullscreen setting:
Click to toggle full screen on and off
But I worried that people would not know to turn it on. So I fiddled with the Windows screen settings. They are now much too big for normal use, but they’re just about right for a video…on Youtube. Here on WordPress, the size is still impossibly small.
I was going to update all my how-to posts, especially the self-publishing ones, by adding videos of important bits, but now I’m not sure I’ll bother. Or maybe I’ll bite the bullet and get a Youtube account.
Do you use the fullscreen mode in either Youtube or Vimeo? Is it more trouble than it’s worth? Should I keep experimenting and make the default Windows fonts even bigger?
Anyway, the video below was recorded using the larger fonts. To me it’s still horribly squint-worthy. What do you think. Please be honest as I don’t want to waste my time making videos that no one will watch.
How to change image compression and resolution in Word 16
Once you have created all the captions for your images [see Adding captions to pictures in Word 16], it’s remarkably easy to generate a Table of Figures from them.
To begin, move to the back matter of your document and click the mouse at the point where you want the Table of Figures to appear.
Next, open the References tab and click Insert Table of Figures:
You should now be looking at the Table of Figures dialog box:
As you can see, the default settings are to:
Show page numbers
Right align page numbers
and ‘Caption label: Figure’
If you are happy with these default settings, click the OK button.
Note: if you have created different kinds of captions – for example, one for ‘Figures’ and a second one for ‘Tables’ – clicking the down arrow next to ‘Caption label’ will allow you to choose a different label. In this way you can generate a separate table for each label.
To change the default settings of the Table of Figures, click the Modify button on the bottom right of the dialog box [circled in orange above].
You should now see a second dialog box that displays a summary of the current style settings for the Table of Figures:
These settings include font size and spacing, etc.
To change the default style settings, click the Modify button to the right of the preview pane.
Note: these settings control how the table is displayed, not how the captions are formatted. To modify the appearance of the captions, see Adding captions to pictures in Word 16
You should now be looking at the ‘Modify Style’ dialog box you first encountered when you changed the ‘Normal Style’ for your document] :
Format the Table of Figures as you wish and then click OK to save and exit the Modify Style dialog box. The appearance of the Table of Figures should now be customised to your specifications.
Unlike the Table of Contents, there is no specific command that allows you to delete the Table of Figures.
To delete the whole Table of Figures, you will have to manually select the entire table as if you were selecting a paragraph of text.
Note: simply clicking inside the Table of Figures will not work.
Once you have manually selected the whole table, press the Delete key on the keyboard. The Table of Figures will now be deleted, but the captions underneath the actual images still remain so you can reinstate a Table of Figures at any time.
This is the last of the graphics related how-tos, but the defunct ‘How to Print Non Fiction…’ also contains advanced help on Indexes etc. If anyone would like me to post this information, please let me know in comments.
At their most basic, captions are simply labels that describe the content of an image. As such, you can simply type a label beneath each image and leave it at that, or you can opt to not have captions at all. But if you are going to have captions, I’d strongly recommend using the ‘Insert Caption’ command found on the References tab.
If you use the ‘Insert Caption’ command, Word will automatically label and number each caption for you. Once all the captions have been entered, you have the option of getting Word to generate a Table of Figures like the example shown below:
When images are moved or deleted, Word not only updates the page numbering, it also updates the caption numbering.
To begin, select the first image that requires a caption.
Next, check that the text wrapping of the image is not ‘In Line with Text’. If it is, change it to another option. [See Wrap Text options].
The next step is to open the References tab on the Ribbon and click the option to Insert Caption:
Word will now display the Caption popup:
Click inside the Caption box [after ‘Figure 1’], press the spacebar and type the description of the image.
Click OK to complete the caption. Word will automatically create a text box for the caption and insert it into the document, directly below the image to which it belongs.
Click the caption to select it. When the text box frame appears around the caption, hover the mouse over the frame until the mouse changes to a black, four-headed arrow as shown below:
Click-hold-and-drag the text box to a new location.
Until now, the image and its caption have acted as two, separate objects, but it is possible to ‘lock’ them to each other via the ‘Group’ function. Grouping creates an outer ‘envelope’ around the two objects so they can be moved as one.
To group an image and its caption, first check that the text wrapping of the image is not ‘In Line with Text’.
Note: Grouping is only possible if the text wrapping of the image is not set to ‘In Line with Text’.
The first step is to click the caption. A text box will appear around it.
Next, hold down the Shift key on the keyboard while you click the image.
Now, both the image and the caption will have ‘handles’ around them, but they are not yet grouped:
Next, right click either the image or the caption.
Note: right clicking causes a context sensitive menu to be displayed.
You should now see a menu with ‘Group’ as one of the options:
Click Group to display the Group sub-menu.
Now click Group on the sub-menu. The image and its caption will now remain locked to each other until you ungroup them.
To move a grouped object, click on the image to display the outer frame and handles.
Note: if you click in the caption area, you will select the caption text box as well as the outer frame.
Next, point the mouse at the top of the outer frame until it changes to a black, four-headed arrow [as shown]:
Click-hold-and-drag the group to the required position.
The type of movement available to the grouped object will depend upon the text wrapping chosen for the image before it was grouped. For example, if ‘Square’ was chosen as the original text wrapping, the text will flow around the grouped object in a ‘box’ shape.
To delete the whole grouped object – i.e. the image and its caption – click the outer frame of the object to select it. Then press the Delete key on the keyboard.
In the next post, I’ll explain how to use these captions to create a Table of Figures.
Although it’s always preferable to edit images using dedicated graphics software, it’s often necessary to do minor edits once the images have been inserted into a Word document. This is especially true after the A4 Word document has been converted into the required paperback size [trim size].
In this post, we’ll look at basic image editing tasks you may have to perform in Word 16.
Selecting an image
To select an image in Word 16, simply click it.
You should now see a frame and circular ‘handles’ around the outer edge of the image:
All of the handles will resize the image, but only the corner handles will keep it in proportion.
Change the size of an image
To decrease the size of the image, hover the mouse over one of the corner handles until the mouse pointer changes to a diagonal arrow.
Click-hold-and-drag the handle into the middle of the image.
To increase the size of the image, drag the corner handle away from the image.
Cropping allows you to cut away the unwanted parts of an image. This technique is particularly useful if you want to create a ‘close up’ of one particular detail, or when the details are too small to see clearly, but the image itself is already at the maximum size for your page.
To illustrate this point, have a look at the two screenshots below:
In the first screenshot, you can barely see the ‘Crop’ option. You certainly can’t see any details about it. In the second screenshot, only part of the Ribbon is visible, but the ‘Crop’ option is shown in ‘close-up’ and is easy to read.
This will cause the image frame to be displayed. It will also make the ‘Picture Tools’ tab available on the Ribbon.
If the tab is not open, click Format as shown below:
You should now see the ‘Crop’ option on the far right of the tab:
To crop the selected image, click the Cropicon [not the word or arrow] on the Ribbon.
The image will now display the distinctive black, crop handles:
Point the mouse at one of the crop handles until it changes shape and looks like a smaller version of the crop handle:
Click-hold-and-drag the handle towards the middle of the image.
When you release the mouse button, the grey area visible in the background represents the area of the image that will be cropped:
To complete the crop process, click the Crop icon on the Ribbon again.
Once the image has been cropped, click it again and use the corner ‘handle’ to make the image bigger. This basically creates your ‘close-up’.
Moving an image in Word
Depending on how you originally inserted your image into Word, changing the page setup of your document may mean that you also have to re-align the image on the page.
The first step is to click the image to select it.
Next, point the mouse at the image. When the mouse changes to a four-headed arrow, click-hold-and-drag the image to a new location:
If the image won’t move, it means that the default ‘Wrap Text’ setting – i.e. In-line with Text – is still in force. This setting locks the image to the text at its current location.
To ‘unlock’ the image, open ‘Format’ on the Picture Tools tab:
Next, click Wrap Text to display the menu of text wrapping options. In the example shown, ‘In Line with Text’ is the active wrap text setting. You can find detailed pictures and descriptions of the wrap text settings here.
To select one of the other Wrap Text options, click the icon next to it. Depending on which option you chose, you should now be able to move the image on the page.
PDF stands for Portable Document Format. With PDF documents, each page is like a ‘snapshot’ of the original Word page. That’s why the format is called WYSIWYG – what-you-see-is-what-you-get.
Note: KDP will accept a variety of common file formats but recommends the PDF format.
Converting a Word document to PDF begins with ensuring that all the fonts in the Word document are properly ‘embedded’. Embedded fonts are flattened into ‘pictures’ so the appearance of the text does not change if the printer doesn’t have access to the same font.
Note: this is particularly important with POD printers as they will flag non-embedded fonts as errors.
The following instructions are provided for Word, versions 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007 and 2003.
Word 2007 is capable of converting files to PDF format, but first you will have to download and install an ‘add-in’ program from Microsoft. The easiest way to locate and install this Word add-in is to click the Office button and select the ‘Save As’ option.
Next, click the option that says ‘PDF or XPS’.
Word will automatically take you to the relevant Microsoft page and download the add-in for you. After that, you will be able to save your documents as PDF whenever you wish.
Before KDP prints your book, it carries out a technical review. If the review finds that your book still contains non-embedded fonts, it may be because they are not standard to Word.
Note: some fonts imported into Word do not allow Word to embed them.
To check the status of the fonts in your book, create a PDF of the document and open it in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer, you can download a free copy from the Adobe website:
Adobe bundles other software with its download, so unless you particularly want these software applications, untick all the checkboxes as shown below:
You should also note that ‘Acrobat Pro DC Trial’ is for evaluation only. If you want to keep using it, you will have to pay.
Once Acrobat is installed, find the PDF version of your book on your computer and double click the file name to automatically open it in Acrobat Reader.
Click the Acrobat File tab to display the File menu:
From the File menu, select ‘Properties’ as shown above.
You should now be looking at the ‘Document Properties’ dialog box:
Click the Fonts tab as shown above.
You should now be looking at a list of all the fonts contained in your document:
Every font in the list should be shown as ‘Embedded’ or ‘Embedded subset’.
Any fonts not shown as ‘embedded’ will be the cause of the KDP error.
The easiest and simplest way to fix the KDP font error is to replace the imported font with a standard Word font. There are other ways to fix this problem, but they are quite advanced and far beyond the scope of a guide for beginners.
In the next section we will look at preparing the cover of your book using a template guide.
Once the sections of your book have been set and unlinked [see ‘Section Breaks‘], you will be able to apply different page numbers to each section – i.e. Arabic numerals [starting at ‘1’] for the Chapters and Roman numerals [starting at ‘i’] for the Back Matter.
To set the first page number, navigate to the start of Section 2 – i.e. the start of the chapters.
Doubleclick inside the Footer area. This opens the ‘Headers and Footers Tools, Design’ tab.
Click Page Number to display the Page Numbers menu:
The first four items on the menu allow you to choose where on the page the page numbers are to go. Click the page number position you prefer. This will cause the page number style menu to display.
In the previous example, the position is ‘Bottom of Page’ and the style is ‘Plain Number 2’.
Click the page number style you prefer. You should now see a page number in the Footer, but it will not be ‘one’. For now, Word is still counting pages from the very beginning of the document.
To make the first page of Chapter 1 start at ‘one’, you have to format the page numbers.
You can sometimes experience page number problems that have nothing to do with the section breaks. Some of the most common involved page numbers that appear truncated or do not show up in Print Preview at all.
If you are experiencing problems like these, the cause could be the Word Footer or the printer that is installed with Word.
The diagram below represents a Word page:
The grey area represents the whole, A4 page in Word.
The blue area is the printable area of the page – literally the area your printer is capable of printing.
Although Word allows you to set whatever margin you please, the printer attached to your computer has its own printable area, and this area over-rides any margins set by Word.
The yellow area at the bottom is the Footer. The page number is positioned near the top of the Footer.
If the Footer area does not extend up into the printable area of the page, or does not extend high enough, the page number will either not show or may appear truncated [as in the example].
In Windows, your computer can have a number of different devices installed – such as printers, scanners, fax machines etc – but only one will be the default device. If your printer is the current ‘default device’ you can temporarily disable it by making some other device the default.
The printer will still be installed, but it will not be available. This means two things:
Word will not be constrained by the printer’s printable area.
You will not be able to print with the printer while it’s not the default device.
When the page numbering in Word has been completed, you can simply return the default device to the printer, and it will work again.
In Word, the purpose of a section break is to isolate one part of the document from the rest. The new, isolated section can then be formatted differently to the rest of the document.
This is particularly useful when printing novels because the page numbering of the three parts – front matter, back matter and chapters – is usually different for each part.
For example, a typical novel may have no page numbering for the front matter, but the chapters will have Arabic numerals [ 1, 2, 3 ], while the back matter has Roman numerals [ i, ii, iii ]. To complicate matters further, both the Arabic and Roman numerals are required to start at ‘one’.
The only way to set different page numbering, and number styles, for different parts of a book is to ‘isolate’ each part using section breaks.
As a general rule, most books need to be broken up into three sections – one for the Front matter, one for the Chapters and one for the Back matter – but you will only need to set two section breaks manually. The third section break is set automatically by Word and includes the parts of the document that are left over – i.e. that remain outside the manual section breaks.
There are four types of section breaks in Word:
Continuous – sets a section break but allows the text to continue on the same page.
Next Page – starts the new section on the next page.
Odd Page – begins a new section and attempts to start it on the next, odd-numbered page.
Even Page – this section break works in the same way as the Odd Page break, but it attempts to start the new section on the next even-numbered page.
All of the section breaks have their uses, but I recommend using the ‘Next Page’ section break only.
Apart from choosing the correct type of section break, there are also do’s and don’ts governing how and when to set section breaks. These include:
Do your formatting and set your ordinary page breaks first.
Always begin inserting section breaks from the end of the document, not the beginning.
Always set the section break command in front of the new section, not at the end of the previous section.
Unlink the sections, starting with the last one.
Do not try to format the page numbering until the section breaks have been unlinked.
To set the first section break, navigate to the end of the document and click just in front of the first word of the Back Matter [see Front Matter, Back Matter & ISBNs].
Next, open the Layout tab on the Ribbon and click the Breaks option:
This will open the Breaks menu which contains options for Page and Section Breaks.
From Section Breaks, click the Next Page option.
Word inserts the section break, but you won’t see it on the page because it is hidden inside the Headers and Footers.
Headers and Footers are located in the white space above and below the area where you type:
The easiest way to open ‘Headers and Footers’ is to double click the blank spaces above or below where you type the text on the page.
Note: to close ‘Headers and Footers’, simply double click inside the body of the page – i.e. inside the area where you type.
As well as displaying repeating text, such as the name of the author, Headers and Footers also display section breaks.
With Headers and Footers open, you should now see something like this:
Note: the Header displays ‘Section 2’ even though only one section break was set. That’s because Word counts the area of the document outside the section break as a section as well, so that area automatically becomes ‘Section 1’.
‘Same as Previous’ indicates that the current section is ‘linked’ to the previous section and shares its formatting.
You will not be able to change the formatting of individual sections until they have been ‘unlinked’, but you should set all the section breaks before you ‘unlink’ them.
To set the final section break, navigate to the very first chapter of your document and click in front of the first word of the chapter heading.
Next, open the Layout tab and click ‘Breaks’.
Select ‘Next Page’ from the list of section breaks.
Now if you open ‘Headers and Footers’ again, you will see that Word has updated the number of sections to three – i.e. the two that you set and the one that Word set to contain everything else in the document.
Once all the section breaks have been set, you are ready to unlink them.
As before, navigate to the end of your document, to the first page of the Back Matter [where you set the section break].
Double click inside the top margin of the page to display the Headers and Footers.
Opening ‘Headers and Footers’ automatically opens the ‘Headers & Footers Tools – Design’ tab [as shown below].
Note: if you do not see these options, click Design on the tab.
The first thing you should notice is that the command ‘Link to Previous’ is highlighted on the Ribbon. This shows it is active.
To unlink Section 3 from the earlier sections, click the Link to Previous option to deselect it. Once ‘Link to Previous’ is deselected, the Header for Section 3 should no longer display ‘Same as Previous’:
With ‘Headers and Footers’ still open, click inside the Footer and deselect the ‘Link to Previous’ option from there as well.
After you have unlinked Section 3, find the first page of Section 2 and unlink the Header and Footer as for Section 3.
Once you have Sections 2 and 3 unlinked, you will have three, completely separate areas in your Word file, each one ready to be formatted in a different way.
The next chapter will look at setting up different page numbering, and page number formatting, for each of the three sections in your book file.
Although it’s not strictly necessary to include a Table of Contents [TOC] in a paperback novel, Word does offer two automatic TOC styles that are very easy to use. Both are based on the Heading styles, so if you used Heading 1 on your Chapter headings, most of the work has already been done.
As well as being easy to use, Word’s automatic TOC styles are also easy to update – for example if you add or remove significant amounts of text from the document.
Next, click at the end of the Copyright Page and insert a Page Break as shown:
The cursor will now be positioned at the top of the new page.
Open the ‘References’ Tab and click Table of Contents:
You should now see a drop down list of options. At the top of the list are previews of the pre-set TOC styles. At the bottom are four further options. The fourth option is only available with Custom Table of Contents.
Click either AutomaticTable1 or AutomaticTable2 to select it.
Note: if you generate a Table of Contents before formatting the page numbering of your book, Word will use its automatic numbering system – i.e. counting the Title page as ‘1’ – for the Table of Contents. After you have formatted the page numbering, you will need to update the TOC to reflect the correct page numbers.
Any changes to your document, such as the addition or subtraction of pages [or the formatting of the page numbering], will mean that the Table of Contents must be updated.
To begin, click inside the Table of Contents to automatically select the entire table. It will look something like this:
Next, open the References tab and click the Update Table option:
Word will check every Heading in the table and update the page numbers as required.
Note: if you have made substantial changes to the document, Word may ask if you want to update the page numbers or the entire table. Select the entire table.
Click inside the Table of Contents to select the entire table.
Next, open the References tab and click the option for Table of Contents.
On the Table of Contents menu, click the Remove Table of Contents option:
This will remove both the TOC entries and the table itself.
Note: You can click ‘Remove Table of Contents’ without first selecting the TOC entries, but this will cause a Continuous Section Break to be left behind. Not only will this section break clutter up the file with unnecessary commands and functions, it may also interfere with manual section breaks inserted later on.
In the next section we will look section breaks and how to use them.
