Razorclaw X wrote:

  What would a user of a program, say, WordPad, do to fix columns? All
this time I simply hit 'enter' whenever the text reached the end of the
row.... so how would someone get, say, 60 columns with precision?

Being a user of WordPad myself, I may have a good solution for you.
This solution, or minor variants of it, tends to work with most word
processors.

Create a new text (not Word, RTF, or any other format) document, or edit
a text document that is already formatted to 60 columns or less.  The
document should appear in monospaced font automatically.

Copy and paste the following line into the top of your document:
012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
or type it in by hand (just type 0123456789, select it, hit Ctrl+C, then
hit Ctrl+V six times).

Adjust the size of your WordPad window horizontally to *just* beyond the
point where the horizontal scrollbar appears at the bottom.  (You'll
want the right side vertical scrollbar to appear before you do this; you
may want to insert blank lines to force it to appear.)

Note that, at this size, when you insert 60 characters on a line, the
bottom scrollbar does not appear, but when you insert the 61st
character, the scrollbar appears.  As you write your fic, make sure to
insert a newline whenever the bottom scrollbar appears.

And, voila!  60 characters with precision.  (I use 74 myself; I used to
use 80 until the RAAC moderators complained.)  Just remember to remove
the number line from any versions of your fic that you send out (one of
my personal markers between draft vs. final versions is that, in my
files, the number line appears in any draft versions - I copy and paste
these starting below the number line.  Removing this is one of the last
things I do to my fic files.)

Be sure to test this if you try it on other processors.  (For instance,
with NotePad, if you join two lines temporarily to move a word from one
line to the line above it, you have to save your file before the bottom
scrollbar resets itself to the new maximum number of characters.)