Deborah Woehr

What Fonts Can I Use?

With Lulu, you can use any font you’d like for your book, as long as you embed them into your PDF file before uploading. I’ll include their font list below.

* Arial
* Book Antiqua
* Bookman Old Style
* Century
* Courier
* Garamond
* Palatino
* Tahoma
* Times New Roman
* Verdana
* Symbols

For the purpose of simplicity, I chose the Palatino font for the paperback version of WBA’s anthology. That way, I didn’t have to bother with the embedding process because I wanted to speed up the printing process.

Text Formatting

Below are the steps you need to take to optimize your pages for print. Prepare to ditch all of the rules you learned in typing class.

1. Change your straight quotes into curly quotes. In Word, select “AutoCorrect” from the Tools menu, followed by the “AutoSelect” tab. Make sure the “smart quotes” option is selected. Then press Okay. Make sure your quotes are facing the right way.

2. Replace hyphens with em dashes. By default, Word replaces two dashes with a single em dash. If you need to convey a range (such as 2004-2007), use an en dash, which is a cross between a hyphen and an em dash. Do not put a space before or after these dashes.

Windows command for en dashes: Control-Minus (on the numeric keypad)
Mac command for en dashes: Option-Hyphen or Command-Minus

3. Ellipses. Add spaces between the letters and periods of all ellipses. Ex. a . . . a In Word, use the Nonbreaking Space with these commands:

Windows: Control-Shift-Space
Mac: Option-Space

4. Print Emphasis. We were all taught to underline our character’s thoughts as well as titles before we submit our manuscript to traditional publishers, who will then italicize the underlined words before they publish your book. Change every underlined word into italics.

5. Print Spaces Between Sentences. For print books, use a single space between every sentence and after colons. Use the Find/Replace feature to make this change.

6. First-Line Indents. Do not use the tab! Instead use the ruler or the paragraph format dialog box and set your indent to 1/4 or 3/8 of an inch.

7. Delete all hard returns. Using the Paragraph Format dialog box, set your spacing before and after all headlines and body text. Use 1.5 spacing between headlines and paragraphs as well as between paragraphs.

8. Set all paragraphs to justified format. Go to “Preferences” and select “Do full justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows.” Word should be able to squeeze and stretch the spaces between the words without making them look funky.

9. Check for Widows and Orphans. Select all of your text; check the Line and Page Breaks tab in the Paragraph Format menu; and click “Control Widows & Orphans option. Press Okay. Check each page to see if this worked. If not, you can combine paragraphs or insert a page break to eliminate the problem.

10. Use a Drop Cap to start each chapter. Select Drop Cap from the Format menu and click on the “Dropped” icon.

That was a mouthful, wasn’t it? Stay tuned because there’s more to come.