Fix the formatting problems Bookbndr flags

What you'll do: review the Document health check on the Setup step and clean up the issues it finds in your manuscript.

What Document health does

When Bookbndr scans your document it looks for common formatting problems that can spoil an e-book, and lists them with a count. If your document is clean you'll see ✓ No formatting issues found.

Issues are grouped into categories:

• Spacing — inconsistent paragraph spacing, double spaces, trailing spaces, empty paragraphs used as spacers.
• Typography — straight quotes that should be curly, triple periods that should be an ellipsis (see smart punctuation).
• Lists — list items that were typed by hand instead of using Word's list feature.
• Structure — chapter and section headings that were typed as ordinary text instead of using a heading style.
• Accessibility — images missing alt text, and similar.

Headings that aren't styled as headings

This is one of the most common — and most costly — problems. Bookbndr builds your chapters and table of contents from Word's heading styles. If you typed a heading like Prologue, Chapter 1, Preface, or Table of Contents as normal text (even if you made it bold or centered by hand), Bookbndr can't tell it apart from body text: it won't start a new chapter and it won't appear in the table of contents.

Document health flags these under Structure and tells you how many it found. It recognizes the usual section names — chapter and part numbers, prologue, epilogue, preface, foreword, afterword, acknowledgments, table of contents, and more — including when they're followed by a colon or dash and a subtitle (for example Chapter 1: The Storm).

Fix an issue

1. Read the issue's description and the snippet of text it points to.
2. When you're in Word, click Go to first ↗ to jump straight to the spot.
3. Fix it in Word, then press ↻ Re-scan document in Bookbndr to update the list.

Fix all mis-styled headings at once

For the heading (Structure) issue you don't have to fix each one by hand — click Fix all to apply the Heading 1 style to every flagged paragraph in one step:

• In the Word add-in, the paragraphs are restyled directly in your open document, and the list refreshes.
• In the browser (uploaded document), Bookbndr writes the corrected styles into a copy of your .docx, updates the chapters and table of contents on screen, and downloads the fixed file so you keep the change.

You don't have to fix everything — these are warnings, not blockers — but clearing them produces a noticeably cleaner book. Many typography issues are also tidied automatically at export by smart punctuation.