“It just won’t work right!”

I was editing a local language version of “The Great Controversy” for printing and followed several page formatting videos step-by-step. I printed a sample document to test my understanding of the process. It seemed like I had done everything correctly.

When you open a book, you see that the inside margin is wider than the outside margin. This margin, or gutter, prevents the text from being too close to the center binding. When I printed, my margins were reversed. My gutter kept showing on the outside of the page, and the outside edge moved to the inside.

I prayed, asking God for wisdom, and then watched more videos. My results were always the same. For five days, I struggled to print the book, even posting messages on Facebook, hoping someone could help. Help never came. In the meantime, I found an older program that runs on Java and divides books into sections called signatures, then saves them as PDF files for printing and binding.

Finally, I began experimenting, changing things to see if I could stumble upon the answer. When I turned my attention to the page numbers, I noticed the first page was “0” instead of “1.” I made the correction. Voila! The document gutters were now where they should be. Everything else now fell into place.

I saved the document as a PDF and used that simple old Java program to divide the book. The gutter remained in the correct location. With so much practice, I can now quickly format a book. By the time you read this article, I will have printed the book, by God’s grace. I thank Him for helping me through YouTube, teaching me what I did not know, and giving me intelligence to find the problem.

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