Bold and Italics not showing after conversion

[nanwalker]

Hello. I just published my e-book at Smashwords. I went over and over the book beforehand, but when I published it and viewed it on my Kindle, all the Bold and Italics were missing. The underlined words were fine.

Also, the hyperlinks from the Table of Content, which worked fine in the .doc I uploaded to Smashwords aren't working. (Well, actually, they work headed BACK to the ToC, but not from the ToC TO the Chapters.

Any ideas for me to fix these problems?

Thanks!

[Ted]

If the bold and italics appear in your PDF and your epub version, and the hyperlinks work properly in both those formats, then I would upload the work again to Smashwords. Sounds like a glitch somewhere.

[nanwalker]

Actually, the bold and italics are NOT showing up in the PDF either. And the hyperlinks are having the same problems. They are all fine in the Word doc I created for Smashwords. But once converted, only the underlined text stayed formatted.

[Ted]

Apr 3, 2012 20:32:40 GMT -8 nanwalker said:

Actually, the bold and italics are NOT showing up in the PDF either. And the hyperlinks are having the same problems. They are all fine in the Word doc I created for Smashwords. But once converted, only the underlined text stayed formatted.

Review the Smashwords Style Guide, Step 11 - Managing Hyperlinks. If you've done everything correct, including saving your Word Doc as a .doc and not the default .docx, then it would appear the Word has gone stupid and you'll have to nuke your work.

The latest version of the Smashwords Style Guide is March 2012. Download it here... www.smashwords.com/books/view/52

[nanwalker]

I redid the hyperlinks a third time and this time they work. Yay!

I went in and created a special bold and a special italics style under the "Normal" style and formatting (thinking it may not be reading the little "bold" etc shortcuts at the top of the doc) and replaced all the bold and italics with this formatting. Didn't work. Still no bold or italics when converted.

I hesitate to nuke my work. Why would the underline be fine and the others not be?

[Ted]

So they hyperlinks work, but your special bold & italic aren't showing up. Sounds like a MSWord problem.

All my ebooks have plain styles for the TOC and the hyperlinks, are easy to read, and don't create issues with ereaders or other devices.

Rather than nuke your work to fix the bold/italic problem why not just make them plain. Plain works fine on all ereaders. If you must have bold/italic styles, you'll have to nuke your work and start over again.

[Ria Stone]

While this is an old post -- I wanted to add that I, too, am having this problem.

Word Styles is very sensitive.

While I think I have solved the loss of italic and bold typefaces, I am not sure my fix is the best approach. I hesitated to use Mark Coker's idea of using Word's normal style and modifying it as a SW body text but I did. But, my first problem was the fact that my original manuscript was formatted in iWork Pages in Times Roman when I saved it as a Word .doc, it kept the Times Roman typeface and I did not realize that I should have changed the style to reflect Times New Roman.

Anyway, in the Word .doc, I could see my italic and bold typefaces but they weren't showing up in the final products. When I reexamined the .doc, when I put my cursor over the words in italic or bold, the italic or bold on the format bar was not recognizing the italic or bold type, so I had to highlight the words and change them to Times New Roman Italic or Bold. I think that fixed it but I have been running in circles so I have lost track of what worked and what didn't.

Plus, I went back and changed my body text from normal to SW body text because I felt normal was making changes I could not see.

While my pdf, mobi and epub looked fine in that regard, there were other issues.

But, after all this, when I went to the version "read online" it was an awful jumble of times new roman and arial body text. To my mind, that is not acceptable.

I can't help but be disappointed.

[Ted]

You might want to download the free MSOffice replacement LibreOffice and then open your converted iWork Pages doc in it. Quite often MSWord adds a lot of hidden code crap which causes nothing but headaches, and is why the 'nuclear' option is often the only resort.

MSWord caused me nothing but headaches with the TOC the first time I uploaded a document. I resorted to hard-coding each Bookmark and Link after nuking the sucker.

I believe LibreOffice has a MAC version.... www.libreoffice.org/

If the javascript online version is showing TNR and Arial body text and you changed all text in document to TNR only then MSWord has messed up once again. See how your document looks in LibreOffice, then you can save it as a MSWord .doc and try uploading that version. If you do use LibreOffice add a a notation to saved title of file, something like 'my book-LO to doc".

[Ria Stone]

Hi Ted,

Yeah, MSWord is a bear. Thanks for the tip.