On Sun, 8 Dec 1996, Andy Skuse wrote:

At 02:27 AM 12/8/96 -0600, RPM wrote:

<snipped stuff about line lengths of stories>

-rpm, wondering how Bert keeps all his stuff in that nice and narrow
     format...

I once asked Bert how he posts stuff to the list and he seems to go through
the same process I do, but he saves his posts as ascii text versions for his
attachments. He uses Word, so I imagine he sets the width of his chapters by
adjusting the right margin. I have found setting the right margin in Word to
have odd results sometimes, so the best bet is to Select All of your text
and then drag the right margin marker to the width you desire.

I post my chapters to the FFML in the body of an email message, and also
convert them to .txt versions for my website. For posting to the FFML, I
first write the chapter using Word (6.0) and set the right margin at 5
inches. This width seems to be about right when I eventually copy and paste
the finished chapter into a Eudora email message. Then, I have to reformat
the chapter for my website as a .txt version, so I save the completed Word
document as a basic .txt file (no layout etc.) and open it using the DOS
Editor. Using the DOS Editor, I go through the tedious task of fixing the
widths of each line to 78 characters (the right margin of the DOS editor is
exactly 78 characters). It was a pain in the ass at first, but after a while
you figure out ways to make it less time-consuming. Once the chapter is
reformatted I save it as a .txt file and compress it with Winzip for
archiving at my site. Using the DOS Editor to reformat the chapters
accomodates just about any DOS or Windows word processor there is. Other
techniques (e.g. just saving as a .txt file in Word) aren't reliable and
often end up having random lines that run past the right margin. If anyone
knows a faster/easier way to reformat a Word .doc file to a 78 line width
.txt file (i.e. automatic word wrapping) I'd love to hear about it.

BTW: A tip - In Word, using the Smart Quotes (curly-shaped quotation marks)
often doesn't translate when you paste your chapter to a Eudora message, and
your chapter may have its quotation marks disappear. To deal with this, go
to "Tools", then "Options" in Word. Click on the tab lablelled "Auto Format"
and look at the bottom left for three check boxes under "Replace". Make sure
the box labelled "Straight Quotes with Smart Quotes" is *not* checked. Click
on OK. The location of this feature may vary with different versions of Word.

Here's a tip, for those of you working in Word:  When you go to save the
story as text, change the font of the whole thing (CTRL-A to select all
of the text, I think) to Courier 10.  It's a proportional font.  Then
set the right margin to 1 inch.  Leave the left margin at its default
setting.  Also, set tabs to 0.67 inches.  Then save as MS-DOS text with
line breaks, and wa-lah.  Perfectly formatted text every time.  8)

Damon Casale, scyth@prolog.com / scyth@andrew.cmu.edu
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