On Sun, 8 Dec 1996, RPM - acct 3/5 wrote:

On Sat, 7 Dec 1996, Bob Barnes wrote:

I'm not sure how this request will be received, but I want to try to ask as
many fan fic authors as possible, so I'll post it here.  I really wish that
the authors and/or the folks who edit the fan fic file for output to the
world would pay more attention to line lengths in the file.  

Hm.. okay..

If the lines are longer than the display width of the computer that they
are being read on, it can be annoying as hell to try to read the story. 
Fan Fic Authors, please please take a look at the line length in your final
output files and keep them fairly short.  Around about 60-65 characters per
line makes for a much, much easier to read file.

Actually, the given universal standard is 78 characters per line.  Also,
when it was first written, I was intending to put it out to the fanfic
mailing list, and rec.arts.anime.stories, where 78 is also the rule of
thumb.

Um, although the standard may be that on RAAC, it should be 72 here.
Why?  Because people quote bits of fanfic all the time back and forth,
and you should leave a little room for > marks the the beginning of
lines.

The reason why the story is STILL in 78 character per line format is
because it takes quite a bit of time to go through that story (it totals
about 460K I believe, or close to it) and narrow it down.  As of late, I
don't have enough free time to do that particular chore.  Also, strange as
it may sound, some people DON'T like it when the width is too narrow (I
have no idea why, though).

The only 'quick fix' to the width problem, a program by... Mike Loader, I
think... or was it Ben Kosse... drats, my apologies to the creator of that
program, anyways, that program still has one or two glitches left to iron
out.

There are other ways.  I've outlined one already, by way of Word.  If
you already have the file in text format, you don't have very many
options.  Here's a suggestion, though.  If you're willing to spend about
20 minutes reformatting the story, download a DOS word processor called
"The Semware Editor" (formerly known as QEDIT; search for it in your web
browser with this keyword), and use ALT-B to reformat each paragraph.
Beware:  if there isn't a blank line at the end of the paragraph, you
will need to temporarily add one and then delete it after you reformat
it, otherwise the reformatting macro will join it to the paragraph
below.  This works reasonably well and reasonably quickly.  If I were
reasonably inclined, I could try writing my own code to do exactly this
from work, taking into account splitting lines at hyphens, ellipses,
etc.  It wouldn't be very much of a chore, but I'd need to have a
reasonable amount of interest in it.  I'd also want to know how most
people begin their paragraphs.  Would it be with a tab character?  Five
spaces?  I can look for white space in a certain format, but I'd need to
know this in advance.

Oh yeah.  I could do DOS or Windows code, depending on what people would
want.

Damon Casale, scyth@prolog.com / scyth@andrew.cmu.edu
You have entered the dimwit zone...