At 01:07 PM 05/3/96 -0500, you wrote:

I'm feeling about one foot tall right now... 

Heh! Welcome to the Beijing Zoo my friend!<g>

I hate long line lengths.  That's it.

So do I... But I didn't realize my line lengths were long... From now on, 
I'm using the 'SuperPad' Panda so kindly recommended to write...

You found it eh? Great (or should I say Super!<g>). If you're using it to
write with, you will still have to consider the width of the document you are
working on and how it will appear on the Fanfic ML. 

I'm using Eudora for my mailer app. The "Message Window Width" in Eudora's settings is set to 80 (characters I assume) using the "Charter BT 9" font (9 point font size). The 80 character width seems to accomodate most fanfics that show up in my mailbox. To write my chapters, I'm using "Word perfect 6.0a for Windows" (Win3.1). I set the right margin to 6" and start writing. When I'm ready to post the chapter, I move the cursor to the top of the document, and then "Select" the entire text by holding Shift and pressing Page Down until it reaches the bottom of the document. I then use the mouse to open the "Edit" menu, click "Copy", and the text is now in Windows' Clipboard. I Save my document as usual and exit the word processor. I then go straight to my email application and open up a New Message window.
I click on the message body with the mouse to place the cursor in there, and then click on "Paste" from the "edit" menu.  Boom! The entire chapter should be there and it should fit the email's window width. I've noticed that if words
end up right against the right side of the message box they will sometimes cause word wrap problems so I go through the paragraph where the 'long' line is and use "Return" and "Delete" to sort things out for that paragraph. This can be VERY tedious, but I think it's worth the effort in the end :) I just checked my Settings for Eudora and the "Word Wrap" feature in "Sending Mail" is set to OFF. This example works with WordPerfect and Eudora but I imagine it's similar in other Windows word processors.

The DOS Edit program is only 78 characters wide. It seems that there are a fair amount of people using the DOS Editor to view fanfics so if you want to
be sure they don't have problems, it's best to write or at least reformat your chapter using the actual DOS Edit program. I've tried converting my WordPerf documents (in the ASCII .TXT format) with minimal success. Too many strange characters in the WordPerf document for DOS Edit to convert reliably.

So if you're going to use Super Pad to write with, make the width of your chapters so they will fit within the DOS Edit program's screen width, or so they will fit into your mailer app's message boxes at a 80 character width maximum. Any larger than 80 and you'll start to get complaints.

Hope this helps!

Panda

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
"Bubblegum Cross" &  "The Dark Traveler"
askuse@execulink.com
Co-Maintainer of the Fanfic ML FAQ
Raven's Garage Web Site:
http://www.netzone.com/~ozymand/raven/ravengar.html
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""