For want of a slash

I love computers. Yes, they make you want to tear out your hair. They make you want to smash them against the floor or throw them out the window sometimes. But when you’re programming them, what you put in is exactly what you get out. And if you make a mistake, it’s not going to do what you want it to. It can’t read your mind or infer what you mean.

As I’m getting ready once again to teach my formatting class – this time at Savvy Authors – I’ve had a “fun” few days formatting an enormously complicated book for a client. The book is non-fiction and filled with blocks of text which needed to have tighter spacing than normal text, bullet points, links, pictures and a table of contents with 110– yes one hundred and ten – entries in it. It was not easy formatting!

I take pride in the design aspect of formatting. It’s where the creativity comes in. It’s where I can have fun and make something look pretty – even if it is only a book where you don’t even see the formatting unless it’s bad. (Friends and relatives have all told me that they’ll stop reading a badly formatted book no matter how good the writing or compelling the story.)

So I spend a lot of time (and by a lot, for this particular book, I spent over over 10 hours making it look right) making the books I format look pretty. I work hard to be sure that everything looks the way it should and work the way it should.

For this book, with 110 entries in a linked table of contents (it was an ebook) in addition to all of the other complicated formatting, there was bound to be something that went wrong. Yes, I left out a few closing codes (in HTML you have an opening code, for example

to signal the beginning of a paragraph, and a closing code

to tell the computer that it’s come to the end of the paragraph), but for some reason my table of contents stopped working after the 85th entry.

I checked and double checked and triple checked that I had the coding for the entry correct, and for every one after it. I ran my file through two different html validators, checking to see where I went wrong. I found a lot of other little mistakes, mostly missing end codes. And then, after pulling my hair out over this for so many hours, I looked at the line just before the entry where things started to go bad, and there it was… a missing “/”. That’s it. I was missing the “/” in the ending code of the sentence prior to the chapter where my table of contents stopped working. Argh!

But I figured it out! It works now, beautifully. And the whole book looks pretty good, even if I do say so myself. It took a lot of work, but it’s done. After this, formatting a romance novel will be a piece of cake… one which I will be very happy to share with everyone who signed up to join me at Savvy Authors beginning Monday morning.  Why don’t you join me? It won’t be hard, and it can be oh-so-rewarding!