Driven Crazy by "Ghost Pages"

[liquidmettle]

Hello Everyone!

This is my first post here and I'm looking to you good people for some help.

I have a self-published poetry volume (on Amazon) that I recently sought to update.

I formatted the entire thing in MS Word (2007 originally, but I have 2013 on my laptop now), and worked out the kinks with page numbers and such on my own when I first published the file.

Recently when I changed some of the content and went to re-upload the file to CreateSpace, I noticed there were a lot of "blank" pages inserted seemingly at random that would throw off the final layout of the book.

As near as I can tell, MS Word is interpreting some of the section breaks as reasons to insert "ghost pages."

For instance, say the document had 4 pages of content. Ms Word is saying 1-5 in the lower left where it tells you what page you're looking at.

In the case of the full document, I have around 54-56 actual pages, but Ms Word is telling me there is 92.

This apparently is also how CreateSpace is viewing this document.

I don't understand where these "Ghost Pages" are coming from as I've never seen Section breaks cause them before. And I certainly did not have this problem with the original file made in 2007.

Is there some compatibility issue created between 2007 and 10 that might be causing the section breaks to behave in this way?

Unfortunately I require them to account for changes in header/footer formatting.

Any thoughts and help would be greatly appreciated!

-LM

[Charles Kenyon]

It is possible you have odd-page or even-page section breaks that when your pagination got thrown off started generating blanks.

Sections / Headers and Footers in Microsoft Word 2007-2013

[liquidmettle]

Hi Charles,

I checked what you anticipated was the issue but all of my section breaks say "Next Page" in parentheses. I threw in a random "Even Page" one to see if the text is different and sure enough, it says Even Page in parentheses instead of Next Page.

So I have all the proper types of breaks, I just have random pages (that I can't see) being accounted for some-how.

[Charles Kenyon]

Can you see the "blank" pages on your screen in print view?
If so, is there anything on them when you have non-printing formatting marks displayed?
Showing non-printing formatting marks in Microsoft Word