"Margin of error" has taken on a whole new meaning for me today. For the first time, I’m preparing my novel "Circle of Fire" for snail mail submission to an agent. So what do I discover? Somehow my wonderful 1" margins have been changed to 1.25" on the sides and 1.13" on the top.
????HUH????
No idea how that happened. But then, unlike some people, I write on no less than three computers. I’ve got my manuscripts backed up on USB drives that I port around with me. Depending on where I’m at, I either use one of my laptops or a desktop machine to write. So the best guess I have is one of my boxes has a slightly different MS Word template that caused the document to be saved with new margins.
So I reset my margins to 1" all around and guess what happens? My novel goes from being 666 pages to 597 pages. YEESH! Margin of error, indeed.
2 Responses
I too have ghosts in Word. I wrote the first draft of my fantasy novel in Ariel, saved it, then copied it to my revision document. This is in Times New Roman. Eventually the whole revised thing is in TNR. But sometimes, when I copy a portion of the revised file, it turns up in the new document in Ariel. As if it remembers its past. I also find that, in order to get 1-inch margins in the printed document, I have to set them at .9 at the bottom and .8 at right. Glad you got rid of the 666, though!
I have found that if the Normal.dot template is saved in a specific font, that cut-n-paste will pick that up. If you change the font there and resave the template, it might fix that error.