Find the hidden mess in your Word manuscript before you format it
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R. S. Breed Founder
Word files collect things you can't see. Indents typed with the Tab key, lines broken with Shift+Enter, a row of empty paragraphs doing the job of a page break, a tracked change nobody accepted. They look fine on screen and come out as uneven indents, odd gaps and missing chapters once the book is formatted.
Here's a checker for them: https://bervet.com/tools/manuscript-checker
Drop in your .docx and it tells you about:
- tracked changes and comments still in the file
- indents made with tabs or spaces
- line breaks inside paragraphs, empty paragraphs used for spacing, double spaces
- straight and curly quotes mixed, ellipses and dashes written different ways, hyphens used as dashes
- scene breaks written more than one way
- chapter numbers missing, doubled or out of order, and chapter headings in different styles
- invisible characters, and the "�" a bad conversion leaves behind
Each one comes with where it is and what to do about it. It reads the Word file's own contents rather than converting it, because converting tidies away exactly the things you're looking for.
It runs in your browser, so your manuscript isn't uploaded. Free for members.