Whine, Whine, Whine...

So, I'm still not exactly "writing" my books, per se, but I did find an interesting problem when I upgraded to MS Word 2007 (and 2008 for the Mac): the new DOCX format (their XML-based format) is nice because it shrinks the size of your files in general. I went from upwards of 1MB per document, down to about 400KB or so... not too shabby.

Unfortunately, it also randomly removes the spaces in between words on the screen, and doesn't seem to see an issue with this. Basically, it would print out the sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog as The quickbrown fox jumped overthe lazy dog, and it wouldn't consider quick and brown as one big misspelled word.

So in effect, if I were to print this, my books would look riddled with space-caused spelling errors, which not even the spell-checker could find and fix for me. I'd have to go proofread all the books again and find these stupid things and fix them - which, FYI, actually embeds two spaces in between the word when you look at it or convert it or whatnot.

The net result of all this? I ditched the DOCX format and am back to the old DOC format from MS Word 2003 and prior. Ugh. How annoying is that?