The Dark Days of Dark Courier

There’s nothing like having to fix a mistake a million times to teach you not to ever make it again.

For the last few hours I’ve been making corrections to Fighter’s Bane.  Not the normal kind of corrections you might expect, but instead corrections needed because of a “technical” snafu, boggle, insert your own word for stinkin’ mistake.

A while back I did some research on the preparations for manuscripts prior to sending them out to publishers or agents.  Font was, of course, a consideration.  For the most part I was pointed to Courier as an acceptable choice.  One author suggested Dark Courier since it showed up better on the page and thus saved some eye strain from those I hoped to win over to my side — that seemed like a no-brainer.

So I converted Fighter’s Bane into Dark Courier thinking that one day I might try to send the book out to an agent.  For whatever reason, that font seemed to not like spaces between sentences, and often — following no pattern I could discern — would just drop a space and squeeze a couple of sentences together.

So, not really liking that, and not wanting an agent to think I'm an indiscriminate spacer, I meticulously picked my way through 100k worth of words, looking for missing spaces.  I kind of didn’t like Dark Courier at that point.

Now, fast forward to a few months ago when I made the brilliant decision to be my own man and publish my own material — I don’t need no stinkin’ agent, editor, publisher, etc., etc., etc., I cried, my fist thrown triumphantly in the air.  (No offense to any of you who actually hold those jobs, because I wish you really were a part of my life at this point.)

So, ready to make my bold debut in the publishing world, I’m momentarily slowed down when I learn Dark Courier really won’t cut it for E-books or CreateSpace — not only does it seem to go wonky when you convert it, but it drops even more spaces when you convert it from Word to PDF, which really limits your ability to love it since you spend so much time grumbling under your breath while you hunt for more missing spaces.

So, out with Dark Courier and in with Garamond — which is a TrueType font and can be embedded in PDF documents; something CreateSpace really likes. 

But does Dark Courier go without a fuss?  Oh no my friend, it does not! 

Much to my dismay, it not only once again tosses out blank spaces like a fastidious baker throws out moldy bread, stinkin’ Dark Courier decides not to share italic formatting information with Garamond; meaning that I have a 100k document without a single italicized word.

Do you have any idea what it’s like to hunt through that many words, trying to find the ones that need to be italicized?  Now I’m not a complete idiot, so I did keep a copy of the old document still in Dark Courier, allowing me to search for italicized words in that document, and then, finding one, switch to the Garamond document, again hunt down the word, and finally apply the much needed italics.

Honestly, stuck at home because of my medical condition, it’s not like I have a ton of things pressing on my time — other than constant pain, medicinal side-effects, and those kind of things — so I have the time to do all this hunting and correcting.  But do I want to?  NO, I most certainly DON’T want to.

Now, I’m sure that one day I’ll find out there’s a simple way to fix all my problems — at least my font conversion problems — but for now, here I sit, taking a break and writing this up for you, so that you can give me much needed sympathy when I once again start tracking down all those naked words so desperately needing to be clothed in italics.

You are NOT my friend Dark Courier, and you should most definitely not expect a Christmas card this year.