Troubleshooting PDF Export Errors

Atticus works best when your individual chapters are 8,000 words or less. We’re constantly updating to help speed this up, but for the time being, here’s a helpful strategy for splitting your chapters without them looking like they’re split when you export:

1. Find a convenient point in a long chapter, somewhere around the 7 – 8 k words point where there is a paragraph that ends at the very bottom of a page.
2. Place your cursor after the very last character and press the Split Chapter button from the toolbar
3. The chapter will break into a new one with SPLIT at the end of the title.
4. Click the three dots beside the title in the left navigation panel and uncheck Numbered
   • this will tell Atticus it’s not actually a new chapter and make sure the numbering continues in order on the next proper chapter
5. On the page, click the gear icon below the title and enable Hide Chapter Heading and Hide from Table of Contents
   • this will remove the chapter heading space, and start your text at the very top of the page. It will also make sure it’s not included in the TOC.

Preview this chapter again and, if it renders completely, repeat as necessary with any other exceptionally long chapters.

If you have any images within the body content of a page or a chapter, you will need to make sure they are not larger than will physically fit on the page. This is most commonly an issue associated with tall images. To test if this is the problem:

• Click the gear icon to the top right of the image
• Resize it to 50%
• Try previewing again
• If it does not work, try making the image even smaller, 20%

If that helps and the preview shows, you can tweak the sizing to fit it how you want it

If, at any point in your book, you have copy/pasted content from any program outside of Atticus, please do the following:

1. Highlight anything that was pasted from outside Atticus
2. Cut it by pressing CTRL or CMD X
3. Paste it back in place without formatting:
   • Press CTRL or CMD + SHIFT + V or
   • right click and choosing “Paste as plain text”

NOTE: Pasting from other programs will often bring foreign coding with it, causing the odd formatting issues. Whenever you’re pasting into Atticus we recommend pasting without formatting. Please see our Copy and Paste Guidelines for further information.

If you’ve used notes anywhere in your book and accidentally left one or more of them blank, or if you have any notes that are more than 1000 words, this can cause the PDF export to fail. To check if that’s the case for you, try this:

1. Click Formatting from the top center
2. Click on your theme and then the Edit button to the top right of the theme thumbnails
3. Scroll down to the Notes Settings section and open it up
4. Change your ePub notes to End of Book (temporarily)
5. Save your theme
6. Scroll down to the bottom of the left navigation panel and open the End Notes page
7. This will give you a visual of all the notes in your book, easily showing you if there are any blank notes or very long notes
   • Add content to or delete any blank notes
   • Edit any very long notes so they are less than 1000 words
   • Edit your theme again to reset your notes to how you want it and save

Try previewing or exporting again after that and hopefully it will work better!

If you’ve used any of the Headings as a paragraph style and applied it to large sections of text, you’ll need to make sure you do not have Keep settings applied to subheadings. Here’s how to check that:

1. Click Formatting from the top center
2. Click on your theme and click the three dots next to the theme title: Select “Edit Theme”
3. In the left sidebar look for Print Layout
4. Make sure you do NOT have a check mark beside Subheadings
5. Save your theme

Try previewing or exporting again after that and hopefully it will work better

Are there any special characters or accented letters in the chapter? Examples include:

• Emojis (e.g., 😀)
• Symbols (e.g., ⍟)
• Accented letters (e.g., à, é)

Some fonts may not support all special characters, so please try changing the body font you have selected in your custom theme and try previewing or exporting again with a new font.