Adventures in formatting

I've started formatting the Free Space books.  It's not hard, just a little tedious.  The tough part was trying to remember how to make hyperlinks in OpenOffice, but it eventually came back to me.  The trick is to make a chapter heading a bookmark first, and then go back to the table of contents and make the hyperlink.  You have to have an existing bookmark for the link to point to.

I also had to delete a lot of spaces.  I learned to type back in the day, and part of that meant putting two spaces between sentences.  I'm still in that habit, and it's something I still do because it's way too much trouble to try to break it, especially when we have tools like "find and replace."  I just tell OpenOffice to find two spaces and replace them with one.  I actually have to do this twice due to typos--in a few instances, I accidentally had three spaces between sentences.  But it's a quick and easy thing to fix.

I had to change the paragraph formatting.  I write in block paragraphs because that's the best way for me to "see" the story in a sort of big-picture sense.  I plan to publish using traditional indented paragraphs, though, so I had to change all that.  Adding those indentations knocked my chapter headings and asterisk breaks to the right a little, so I then had to go back and delete those indentations.

Page breaks between chapters had to be added, and the spacing made consistent throughout.

So there we are.  I've done two of the books.  One left.  Then I'll load them on the Kindle and go over them one last time.  Then the only thing left is setting up and testing a mailing list.