What does “Set it for me” do?
Set it for me is on the findings panel, above the numbers. Press it and the formatter sets your book several times over, measures each result, and keeps the best one.
It works inside the interior style you have chosen. It will not switch you from Literary to Genre — that is a look, and looks are yours. If you want the styles compared, that is Advanced Typeset.
What it does, in order
- Turns on river repair, unless you have deliberately turned it off. It closes about a third of a book's channels of white without moving a single line, so nothing repaginates.
- Tries every chapter opener drop — how far down the page a chapter starts. It changes how the whole book falls and costs you nothing.
- Measures the other two Page fill settings at the winning drop, so you can see what they would give on your book rather than on a description. See What is Page fill, and what is a river of white?
- Sets your book with what it found.
You can carry on working while it runs, and anything you change cancels it — your decision always outranks its search.
The numbers beside it
- Pages that fill to the bottom — of the pages that are supposed to reach the bottom margin. A chapter's last page is meant to end early and is never counted against you.
- Pages with rivers of white — pages carrying a pale channel running down them, opened by wide word spaces.
- Facing pages that end together — left and right pages of a spread ending at the same depth. One of the quiet things that separates a book from a printout.
- Lines with uneven word spacing — how often a line's spacing jumps noticeably from its neighbors, as "1 in 57 lines".
- Total pages — your print cost and your spine width.
Below them, What to look at separates the two kinds of problem: things the layout can fix, and things only you can, because they are in the writing. A page ending short is often two sentences away from being full.
If it was set for you
A book delivered by BookPublish Concierge was set by hand. Pressing this measures it from scratch and replaces those settings — the typeface, the chapter openers, the spacing — so it asks first. Your writing is never touched, and files already sent to you are never touched.