Booksmart Text Formats

The more I work with Booksmart, the more bugs and annoyances I find.

Try selecting a large body of text – the mouse just can’t seem to get to all of the lines.

Try clicking into some text, the insert point can end up somewhere else.

But the worst annoyance is with formats. Change your Body style to Verdana 12 and format a page. Insert new text inside some text and chances are you will get Georgia 9 instead.This at least is obvious to catch, what isn’t as obvious are your carriage returns – you expect a large white space between lines because you have 12 point but you realize Booksmart has set it back to 9.

Select some text and it will sometimes tell you which font type and font size it is based on the dropdown. At other times it will just show the default font even if its not the one selected – totally inconsistent.

For every hour I spend writing my text, I think I spend an hour correcting Booksmart.

Why bring out upgrades with new features when the existing core is full of bugs?

I agree with this note as well. Until they fix the text options, I will not publish my books. So, I hope that is the next module they are working on. Everyother book software out there has text edting and entry that works.

One tip. If you enlarge your text container a lot, I find that selecting text is a little easier. That is true for handling photo containers too. Seems that moving them is easier if you zoom in a lot.

If anyone has any good pointers for text editing, I would so much appreciate them.  I really want to like this program because I’m sure the final product will be great but don’t know if I can handle the frustration and wasting all my time. 

 I am copy/pasting a travel journal into blurb and have 2 pages per day of my trip.  The first page consists of a photo from that day, the starting point and destination, and then the body text.  I have been very meticulous about formatting – making sure that the text on each page starts/ends where I want it to.  I am on page 50 and thought that everything was going smoothly until I went to "preview" and looked at my book from the beginning.  It was awful!!!  Huge blank white spaces where they hadn’t been before, font and size changes (some 12 pt, some 9), and the journal entries no longer starting on the page where they should but instead starting on the page before.  Trying to fix this is a nightmare because every change I make affects the rest of the book….if I add a return to one page, the next page gets all out of wack. 

Is there some setting I am on that I shouldn’t be??? 

I foolishly spent a couple hours last night going back to the first page and continuing to page 50, just updating the page breaks, font size, and general formatting.  Went back to "preview" and it was ALL MESSED UP AGAIN!!  I sent a few nasty emails to blurb and haven’t heard back.  What a waste of time.  Has this happened to anyone and is there something I can do to prevent this from happening?

Hi wendyart,

If you are experiencing a problem with text in BookSmart please contact us with details of the problem. It’s uncommon for text to randomly change and if it does, there may be another root cause, such as, corrupt font, invalid formatting etc.

Note: Locking post due to age and possible outdated information.

-Craig