For some years we at Energion Publications have struggled with the process of converting manuscripts from the author's format to the final, production ready layout. There are an amazing arrays of software solutions to help clean up text, but there's nothing quite like having it done right in the first place.

Many of the things in this booklet will be extremely familiar to those who regularly use word processing software, but writers often operate with the assumption that if it looks good on the screen, what you see is what you get. That lasts until the first format change.

We commissioned this book to help writers use some basic, automatic formatting: Automatic footnotes, paragraph styles, and bibliographical formatting. We ask our authors to keep it simple. Choose a "Style" for your headings, use bold and italics, but above all, position nothing using the spacebar.

If you use the information in this booklet, you'll have little difficulty, and we'll be able to efficiently format your book for publication. We do hope these simple steps will be useful for others as well.

There are two sections, one for Micorosft Word and one for OpenOffice. The latter will generally be applicable to OpenOffice derivatives, such as LibreOffice.