Italics not working in word

Phil notes that a peculiar feature of Word is its tendency to sometimes undo font changes. He might type, «the cat sat on the mat» and want the word «sat» in italic. That’s easy; he hits Ctrl+I before typing the word «sat» and it duly appears in italic as he types. But, when he then hits Ctrl+I at the end of the word (to turn off italic), Word sometimes thinks this is an undo request and un-italicizes the entire word «sat.» This doesn’t always happen, but does most times, and it really slows down Phil’s typing. He wonders why Word does this.

Word seems to do this if it cannot, for some reason, detect that you have typed at least a full word since turning on the italic formatting. Several readers noted that they had the same problem but were able to eliminate the problem by simply pressing the second Ctrl+I after typing the space after the word «sat.»

Longtime Word users will also recognize that there is another way around this—change how you apply the italic formatting. Many (if not most) Word users will type first, without worrying about formatting. Then they will go back and apply the formatting after they are done composing and editing the text. In this approach, you would type your entire sentence, then double-click on the word «sat,» and finally press Ctrl+I. (Of course, you wouldn’t do this after typing each sentence. I would suggest doing it after each paragraph, each page, or every few pages.)

Author Bio

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen…

TRY THIS AT HOME

You all know that the key to a good ebook format is a squeaky clean source file, right? Word doesn’t produce particularly clean documents. For best results, you should strip out extraneous codes before you begin to format. Mark Coker of Smashwords calls it the “Nuclear Option.” You copy/paste your document into a text editor and that will remove all the unwanted coding. Then you copy/paste the clean text back into Word and you are ready to format.

Anyone who has tried this knows that doing so will not only remove unwanted coding, it’ll nuke your italics, too (and other special formatting and styles). Here is an easy way to tag all your special formatting and then restore it. (What I will show you applies to bolding, underlining, different sized fonts, etc., too.)

Here is a document in need of a good cleaning:

Open the search box and make it look like this:

If you open the “Format” box you’ll see a drop down menu that gives you a “Font” option. Open that.

Notice the many, many options you can search for. Cool, huh?

I have come up with tags through trial and error. I use several different programs when I format ebooks, so I needed something unique for search purposes that didn’t make any of the programs say, “Oh no you don’t!” and crash the search box. I use all caps and hyphens to make sure they don’t get mixed up in the text. The most common tags I use are:

• -STARTI- for italics
• -STARTB- for bold
• -STARTU- for underline
• -END- to close the tag

Back to the document. Click Replace All.

Now all your italics are wrapped in tags. This is a good time to go through and make sure your tags are in the right place and that you don’t have any blank space tagged.

Now copy/paste into a text editor:

All your formatting is gone.

Now open a new file in Word and apply your main style sheet. Copy/paste your text into the new file. Open the search box and make it look this:

Do a Replace All and… ta da!

I generally wait until I’ve formatted all my headers and centering and any other styling necessary before I restore special formatting. Once done, all that’s left to do is to get rid of the tags.

Replace All and done!

In the time it took you to read this blog post, you could have tagged and restored six files. It really is that easy.