Text Processor - Styles I (styling a larger document or a book)

Content of the lesson:

Typesetting of Larger Documents

This lesson deals with typesetting of a larger document. Larger documents can be represented as:

• Books - double-sided, usually hundreds of pages, images
• Professional work - Master or Bachelor thesis
• Seminar work - more pages, structured documents (created by students of high schools for example)
• Textbooks - structured documents which contain longer texts, schemas and often difficult formulas and images (mathematic, chemistry, physics)
• Foreign language literature - there are often special characters inside the text (French, Russian, Japanese, Nordic countries)
• Newspaper and magazines - high concentration of images, articles, high demands on the speed of typesetting (newspaper has to reflect the actual situation - it is necessary to write articles, typeset, print and distribute them in a few hours)
• Guides - instructions and documentations for products (intstructions for a vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, TV etc. usually in more languages)

This problematic is not young at all, people have been dealing with typesetting for hundreds of years. One of the most difficult task has been the typesetting of multilingual Bible.

Software for Typesetting of Larger Printed Documents

The most used programs for typesetting of larger printed documents are:

• InDesign - professional DTP editor from Adobe - http://www.adobe.com/cz/products/indesign/
• LaTeX - non-visual (not WYSIWYG) editor for professional articles which contains support for mathematical formulas - http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX - FREE!
• Microsoft Word - office text processor - http://office.microsoft.com/cs-cz/word/
• Open Office Writer - free office text processor - http://www.openoffice.org/product/writer.html
• QuarkXpress - professional DTP editor for larger printed documents from Quark Inc. - http://www.quark.com/
• Scribus - DTP editor of printed documents which is free - http://www.scribus.cz/

Problems Connected with Typesetting of Larger Documents

Consider you have to typeset a book which will contain text only. You get a plain text (inside a .txt file) - that means there is no graphic formatting, all characters use the same font and size. Your task is to "only" suggest a typesetting or this book and to prepare it for printing. This means you have to solve these steps:

• choose and apply the type and size of font for common text,
• choose and apply the type and size for different levels of headlines,
• set height of lines (spaces between lines, behind paragraphs),
• insert page numbers,
• create the content of the book,
• use the basic typographic rules (for example single-letter prepositions cannot stand at the end of line, you cannot leave one line from a paragraph on a new page etc.) - you can browse this website http://antypa.cz/,
• create an index - list of terms (for professional literature)

Imagine that you use any software in the common way (without styles) and you set the font and size for all paragraphs, spaces between lines and paragraphs and behind headlines. Several people will set spaces behind headlines using enter button to create an empty paragraph (realize that these spaces can have different sizes because of the size of font which was used in the previous paragraph). Try to answer the following questions and consider how much time would you need to do these adjustments inside a longer document without using styles (consider a book of 400 pages with 15 chapters and 40 sub-chapters which has around 2000 paragraphs):

• How can I change size of font in all paragraphs?
• How can I change font in all paragraphs?
• How can I change size of font in all titles of chapters and sub-chapters?
• How can I change line heights in common paragraphs?
• How can I be sure that single-letter prepositions will not remain at the end of lines?
• How can I create a content to contain all chapters and sub-chapters and also assigned page numbers?
• What if the client wants that each chapter has to start on a new page?
• How can I be sure that there is no single line on a new page in the whole book?
• Imagine that you did all of this in a few hours. How can you be sure that you did not forget anything (bad space, font size, missing item in content)? What if the client wants to change the font size (the whole layout will change, many single-letter prepositions will appear at the end of lines, the whole content will be wrong...). In other words - if any change is needed, you will have to check everything and edit the whole book AGAIN.

You will surely face these problems when creating your Bachelor or Master thesis. You can read a part of a real conversation with one student of university which just came from her leader of thesis (it was a 130 pages long document written in Microsoft Word). There are two participants in the following conversation - a student and a "styler" (a styler is a person who is able to work with styles in any DTP program or in text processor at least).:

The conversation ended in this moment and both participants started correcting the thesis using styles. The complete adjustment of this thesis took 12 hours and contained mistakes. At the top of that, every following correction of texts took another 5 hours. Setting and applying styles took around 4 hours and all following corrections only a few minutes. The question is : "Do you want to spend 60 hours or 5 hours when preparing and correcting your thesis?".

Principle of Styles and Their Usage

You can solve most of the problems which were mentioned above using styles. A style is something like a definition for appearance of a paragraph or a headline (size and type of font, space before and after). Styles can automatically solve many typographical rules. Working with styles is simple:

1. Create a style of any type and assign a name to it. You can create a style "základní text".
2. You can set many parameters for this style (parameters for font, paragraph, spaces etc.).
3. Then you can assign this style manually to any text (assign the style základní text to all paragraphs of text). Assignment is done by selecting the text and clicking on required style. After this step the style is assigned to the text. Then you can easily change parameters of every text which is assigned to this style.
4. In case you want to change font for example you can change the style parameters and this change will IMMEDIATELY be visible in ALL paragraphs which are assigned to this style. It is not important how many pages are inside your document - the changes will be applied in all paragraphs because of the style.
5. You can similarly continue with creating additional styles.

The whole process of styling will be shown on a book from Karel Čapek named Dášeňka. We will use the plain text of this book which is available at this page: http://www.mlp.cz/karelcapek/. You can find Čapek's free books at this website. How is it possible that books written by Karel Čapek are available in the Internet? Copyright expires 70 years after the death of owner in Czech Republic so his books are available.

You should download the plain text of book Dášeňka (ONLINE: http://www.mlp.cz/koweb/00/03/34/76/37/dasenka_cili_zivot_stenete.txt, or at this server: karel-capek-dasenka.txt). Copy the text into an empty document inside text processor. We will use Open Office Writer (the situation inside Microsoft Word is analogous).

Typesetting of Book

The window with styles can be found inside the menu Format>Styles and Formatting (or you can view it after pressing F11). Styles can be divided to several types according to the part of document which they affect. We will use paragraph styles (such a style affects the whole paragraph - block) and character styles (such a style affects only selected characters).

There are several predefined styles in the list and you can use them or create new ones with a prefix for better orientation (for example mujstyl_bezny_text, mujstyl_nadpis1,...). A new style can be created after clicking (with right mouse button) on the window and selecting the option "new".

Hierarchical Connection of Styles

You can connect a new style to a defined one. This means that the new style will use all properties of the existing style. You can see an example in the following paragraph.

Consider style Nadpis which is defined to use font Tahoma, font style Normal and size 18 points. Style Nadpis 1 is connected to the style Nadpis and differs only in the font style (bold) and the size (120%). In case you change the font of Nadpis to capitals, the font style of Nadpis 1 will be automatically changed to capitals too. If you change the font size of Nadpis, the font size of Nadpis 1 will be automatically changed too.

You can see a short summary of all styles with their meanings in the following part.

Common text

Create a new style mujstyl_bezny_text:

• Organizer-Name: mujstyl_bezny_text
• Organizer-Following style: mujstyl_bezny_text
• Connected with: - none - (this is very important parameter - our style will be affected only by our settings and by nothing else)
• Font: Georgia (suitable serif font), size 12pt
• Alignment-Options: Justify, last line to the left
• Indention and character spacing-First line: 18pt (1,5 squares or 0,64cm)
• Indention and character spacing-Distance-Bottom: 12pt (1 square or 0,42cm)

Now you can select all text inside the document and apply the style mujstyl_bezny_text by double clicking on the style icon.

You can see the first problem after this step. Spaces between several paragraphs are larger than we set. If you set the program to display "control characters", you can see that there are empty paragraphs at more places inside the document. To correct our document we should remove ALL empty paragraphs. You can do this using the backspace and del keys. I hope you did not think about this option and started laughing after reading this sentence (if yes, you are on the right way and realize that this would be a useless work :).

Additional Texts