This post is to serve as a quick guide to help you create a clean Word document. Wether you are formatting your manuscript yourself, or sending it to an interior designer, there are a few things that you can do to make the process easier. The just of it is... do not use tabs, the space bar to indent, or hit return (enter) multiple times for page breaks or large spaces between your chapter heading and first line.
You may have added unique fonts or images, but before your designer (or you) can format your manuscript, all of those special things will be erased. Instead of formatting each chapter head to look that certain way, the best thing to do is send a screen shot of one chapter. I'd just hate for you to pre-format your entire novel, just to have me erase all of it.
Now as a designer, I fully expect to rid most documents of these pesky little entries, to a point. But if these elements are through out the entire novel, some times they need to be deleted individually, and that can take several hours. So what you'll want to do before the manuscript is formatted is the see how clean your document is before you start.
So how do you tell if your document has tabs or extra spaces? Once your document is open, click on the paragraph symbol. (see the image below for an example)
Below is an example of the hidden characters that appear when you use Word. You will see a paragraph marker, what it looks like when you press tab, and enter.
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