In a Pinch: Forboden Characters, Making Images, and Formatting

Hello again, friends. I greet  you this fine Thursday morning with more nuggets of wisdom.

Are you publishing soon? Going the self-publishing route? Formatting your book yourself? Here's some junk you should probably know...because I found out the hard way and it sent me into an apoplectic fit trying to figure out how to fix it.

Okay, so, Amazon--the behemoth. You'd think these guys would up their ding-dang-darn game already and have pretty much every character set known to man as a "supported" format when you publish with them. Sadly, this is NOT the case.

For those of you not in the know, when I speak of "characters," I am not referring to those beautifully crafted people in the novel you wrote. Not this time. This time, I'm referring to the actual freaking LETTERS you use when you clickety-clack-type that novel.

Now, most of you are probably smarter than me and only used the predominant Latin alphabet we see in the English language. A through Z, yeah? Keep it simple. More power to ya. This part of the blog probably won't apply to you, but skim down to the images part if that's the case.

The rest of you: hunker down over here and listen real close. If you wrote fantasy, sci-fi, etc. and thought you were going to be tricksy by using character sets from other languages sprinkled through your manuscript, you might have screwed yourself. Take a look at this guide to see if the character sets you used are supported; you'll notice both a visual guide and a list there. CHECK THEM. Be sure. If you publish with unsupported characters, you will end up with blank boxes, weird script, or question marks to indicate said characters.

In my case, I've got two areas where this comes into play--the Maltese alphabet and the Elder Futhark. In the Maltese language, the barred H (ħ) character indicates a different phonetic sound than the Latin H, which lent itself well to a divergent culture of gods and their progeny. The Elder Futhark, the runic alphabet used in ancient Scandinavian and Germanic cultures, was my creative attempt at scene breaks. The Futhark was also used in rune-casting, where each letter indicates certain aspects of fortune or misfortune, and I decided to use three runes to include hints as to what was happening in the chapters. Clever me, right?

Now, there's not much I can do about the barred H character except get phonetic on the spelling. The Futhark was a different ballgame, however. This is where the images part of the wisdom comes into play.

In my search for a way to circumvent Amazon's bastard limitations, I came across a blog that detailed how to create and embed images into my manuscript. All well and good, except it said to do screen shots. Now, I don't know what programs this blogger was using, but I spent an ungodly amount of time ripping my hair out because this shit just DID NOT work. I could create screen shots, pull the image into GIMP, crop the desired runes and all...but I could not make these assholes the same size for each scene break. Plus...the image deteriorated and was grainy. EW.

If you're a little on the OCD side--or even just want your book to look slightly more professional--this shit is a no go. In my quest to figure out how to make it look nice using limited freeware, this was my alternative process.

First off, go download GIMP if you don't have it. It's Photoshop for the poor man, freeware that allows you to manipulate images. You can find it from the GNU project, and it's virus free. Once you've done that, this is how it goes.

You want to create a new project, like so:

Next, you're going to want to decide how big this bastard canvas needs to be. As you'll be working within a word processor, use inches as your measurements. For me, I needed something smaller, so I went with a 2 inch width by 1 inch height. Super simple ratios.

Once you have your canvas size selected, you need to "color to alpha." This makes your base canvas transparent, so when you upload the images, it doesn't create funky gray/white washes against the manuscript. You ONLY want the text to show up.

Should look like this:

Next comes the fun part. You need to create a text box layer that lines up with your base. Little time consuming, but it should work out fine if you mess with it a bit. Click the "A" on your toolbox.

You'll get the general text cursor (looks like an I). I try to click as close to the left edge of the base as possible when putting the text box in. Saves a little time in lining it up. After that, you'll see the yellow boxes at the edges and corners of the text layer when you move your mouse around. Use these to stretch it around the base until it lines up.

And voila! All lined up. 

Next, you'll need to copy the text from the manuscript that you want to make an image. 

(SIDE NOTE: I freely admit I got really lucky here. GIMP supports the Futhark runes, so it was a simple matter of copy and paste. Barring that, you'll have to download a free font and unzip it in GIMP. Keep in mind, when I say "free font," I mean free for COMMERCIAL use. If you intend to publish, you have to make sure the fonts you use have a free commercial license or you can be sued for using them on a project you intend to profit from.)

You'll notice my runes are centered (top to bottom and left to right). I did this the easy way, by copying the blank line above and below the text in the word processor (top to bottom alignment). To get center justification, you merely need to choose it from the dialogue in the toolbox (beneath the tools, the dialogue contains options for font, font size, color, alignment, etc).

You have the hovering dialogue for text you can utilize for the font, size, and color, as well. Play with this until you get it the size you want. Best to avoid colors other than black unless you're printing a colored book. Colors don't show up on ebooks anyway.

From here, you want to export the file.

After you've clicked the "Export" option, this dialogue will appear. Remember to save it as a JPG file. This preserves the transparent base, and also helps to reduce deterioration. Kindle only supports JPG and GIF, but GIF is balls for clarity.

(NOTE: If you have to create more than one of these images, DO NOT close the original box/base/text you have created. Merely paste the new text into the same box, replacing what was previously there, and export under a new name. This will save you a lot of time and keep each image to the exact same specifications.)

From here, you upload the file into your manuscript. This is different for each word processor. I only use MS Word. Just a matter of clicking "Insert," "Pictures," and then selecting the saved file.

You may end up playing with the size ratio a bit to get the image to look right when situated with the text. I deleted the blank line above and below where I inserted it, as well. To get the dialogue options, right click on the photo and go to "Size and Positioning."

Make sure your ratios are locked in that dialogue before you mess with anything else, and that you choose the text wrap (in-line) option. From there, you should only need to adjust one ratio (width or height) to get the image the size you want. For me, these scene breaks looked best at a 0.7 inch height and 1.4 inch width.

And there you have it. The final, viable product will look something like this:

Or, in my case, something like this: 

See you on the other side, guys. This publishing junk is a pain in the ass, but there's always something to be learned. Hope this helps you.

And, as always, write on.