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andrewburt · 11-06-2011, 11:52 AM

I wanted to let folks know about a tool we've put up for Smashwords authors to help with the dreaded Nuclear Option that we call the "Nuclear Option Assistant."

We get a lot of crazily formatted .doc files to deal with (we do things like scan/OCR print books for authors or reformat manuscripts they provide, so we have no control over the original), which means we often have to resort to the Nuclear Option. The #1 thing we've found the most annoying about having to employ the Nuclear Option is that it loses all the italics. Grrrr! The other formatting stuff is merely a pain to restore, but ouch! Trying to hunt down all the italics! One little "I" hidden in a paragraph is hard to spot, not to mention there can be hundreds of italicized bits in a novel. Manually marking each to re-italicize takes forever.

That wasn't working for us, so I put on my programmer hat and wrote a program to do it. It takes a .doc file, notes the italics, wipes all the formatting, then restores the italics back, leaving a clean file with just the "Normal" style applied to it, with italics.

Knowing how much of a pain the Nuclear Option is, I thought this "Nuclear Option Assistant" might be of use to others, so I've put it up on our web site as a free tool.

If it's of value to anyone else, you're welcome to use it. It's at: http://ReAnimus.com/fixformat

I hope this helps save people as much gnashing of teeth as it's saved us.

11-06-2011, 11:52 AM	#1
andrewburt Science Fiction Writer Posts: 231 Karma: 124188 Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: Golden, CO Device: several	New tool for Smashwords authors I wanted to let folks know about a tool we've put up for Smashwords authors to help with the dreaded Nuclear Option that we call the "Nuclear Option Assistant." We get a lot of crazily formatted .doc files to deal with (we do things like scan/OCR print books for authors or reformat manuscripts they provide, so we have no control over the original), which means we often have to resort to the Nuclear Option. The #1 thing we've found the most annoying about having to employ the Nuclear Option is that it loses all the italics. Grrrr! The other formatting stuff is merely a pain to restore, but ouch! Trying to hunt down all the italics! One little "I" hidden in a paragraph is hard to spot, not to mention there can be hundreds of italicized bits in a novel. Manually marking each to re-italicize takes forever. That wasn't working for us, so I put on my programmer hat and wrote a program to do it. It takes a .doc file, notes the italics, wipes all the formatting, then restores the italics back, leaving a clean file with just the "Normal" style applied to it, with italics. Knowing how much of a pain the Nuclear Option is, I thought this "Nuclear Option Assistant" might be of use to others, so I've put it up on our web site as a free tool. If it's of value to anyone else, you're welcome to use it. It's at: http://ReAnimus.com/fixformat I hope this helps save people as much gnashing of teeth as it's saved us.