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This is a good time to go through and make sure your tags are in the right place and that you don’t have any blank space tagged. Now all your italics are wrapped in tags. I use all caps and hyphens to make sure they don’t get mixed up in the text. I use several different programs when I format ebooks, so I needed something unique for search purposes that didn’t make any of the programs say, “Oh no you don’t!” and crash the search box. I have come up with tags through trial and error. Notice the many, many options you can search for. If you open the “Format” box you’ll see a drop down menu that gives you a “Font” option. Open the search box and make it look like this: Here is a document in need of a good cleaning: (What I will show you applies to bolding, underlining, different sized fonts, etc., too.)
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Here is an easy way to tag all your special formatting and then restore it.
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Then you copy/paste the clean text back into Word and you are ready to format.Īnyone who has tried this knows that doing so will not only remove unwanted coding, it’ll nuke your italics, too (and other special formatting and styles). Mark Coker of Smashwords calls it the “Nuclear Option.” You copy/paste your document into a text editor and that will remove all the unwanted coding. For best results, you should strip out extraneous codes before you begin to format. You all know that the key to a good ebook format is a squeaky clean source file, right? Word doesn’t produce particularly clean documents.
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