Tracked changes, comments, and what they do to a typesetter
A manuscript with tracked changes still live is the most common way a finished book arrives broken. Not because the edits are wrong. Because the file contains two books, and nothing in it says which one you meant.
The file holds both versions
Turn on tracked changes and your word processor stops overwriting text. Delete a sentence and it is not removed — it is marked as deleted and kept. Type a replacement and that sits beside the old one, marked as inserted. Both are in the document, permanently, until somebody resolves them.
What you see on screen is then a display setting: show the original, show the result, or show the marks. It is a rendering choice, made months ago and forgotten. The file underneath is unchanged either way.
What a converter sees
Suppose a chapter opened with Marianne had never cared for the sea, and in the edit you cut it and wrote The sea had never cared for Marianne. On your screen, with the display set to show the final version, there is one sentence and it is the good one. In the file there are two.
Every piece of software that reads that .docx decides for itself what to do with the pair. Some take the original and silently drop your edits. Some take the edited text, so you learn nothing and do it again on the next book. Some take both, one after the other, and produce a paragraph that says the same thing twice in different words.
That last one is the expensive failure, because nothing looks broken. There is no error, no warning, no missing chapter. There is a page of set type that reads badly, and by the time you notice it you are looking at a proof and blaming the typesetter.
Accept everything, then read the result
The instruction is blunt: accept or reject every change and delete every comment before you export.
Then read what you are left with. That is the half authors skip, and it matters because Accept All resolves everything in one keystroke — including the edits you had not actually agreed to. Your copyeditor's rewrite of chapter nine that you meant to think about. The cut you made at one in the morning and left pending on purpose. Two rounds of a collaborator's changes you never went through line by line.
Accepting all of them is a decision about all of them. If the file has more than a handful of pending changes, walk them one at a time, and work on a copy: once the file is closed and reopened, accepted changes are simply the text.
In the Interior Formatter. It reads your .docx for structure only — chapter starts, italics, bold, scene breaks — and finds chapters even in a file with no styles at all. What it cannot do is know which half of a tracked edit you meant, so a clean file is the one thing it needs from you. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Comments are content, not annotation
A comment is not a note floating above the document. It is stored inside the file, with the commenter's name, a timestamp, and an anchor pointing at a range of your text. Replies are stored too.
Two reasons to clear them. An anchored range is a piece of structure that a converter has to interpret, and interpretations vary. And the names and the remarks travel with the file, which gets handed around — to a formatter, a proofreader, a beta reader, an agent. Deleting every comment in the document takes one menu item.
How to check you are clean
Do not trust that you finished. Turn the marks on and look.
- Set the reviewing display to show all markup. The tidy view with a change bar in the margin looks exactly like a finished document, which is how live revisions reach a typesetter in the first place.
- Step through with the next-change control until it reports none left, rather than scrolling and judging by eye.
- Turn tracking off before you make any more fixes. Otherwise the corrections you make during this pass become a fresh set of tracked changes in the file you are about to export.
- Open the comment pane rather than assuming it is empty. A closed pane and an empty one look identical.
- Filter by reviewer. A file that went to two people carries two sets of marks, and you may have forgotten one of them was ever involved.
The rest of the same pass
While the file is open, take out the other things that came from making a manuscript look like a book.
- Manual page breaks used to fake chapter starts. The typesetter starts chapters itself, on the correct side of the spread; an extra break gives you a blank page.
- Double spaces after periods. Find and replace twice. Justified type stretches word spaces to fill a line, and a doubled space stretches to twice the hole.
- Tab and space indents. The first-line indent belongs to the paragraph style, set in points against the real measure.
- Empty paragraphs used as spacing. They land wherever they land once the text reflows.
- Bold text standing in for a chapter title. A heading style says a chapter starts here; bold 16-point text says nothing, and leaves the machine to guess.
Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly goes through the rest of what survives an import and what does not.
The file you upload is the book. A tracked change is a question you have not answered, and if you leave it in, something else answers it for you.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly · Also: Bringing a book out of Google Docs, Pages or Scrivener · The editing passes that have to happen before typesetting · Punctuation that typesets badly