From: Shunsuke <shunsuke@mailcity.com>
Date: Tuesday, August 25, 1998 4:52 AM

On Mon, 24 Aug 1998 21:57:30   David Homerick wrote:

MegaZone wrote:

You don't seriously think people write fanfics with screen editors like
VI, do you?  They use word processors, which can and do introduce odd
formatting problems when used to create e-mail messages.

As a side note, much of "Thy Inward Love" was written in vi.  That includes
having to insert hard returns every time I edited a paragraph.

I wholeheartedly disagree and see it exactly the
opposite.  For writing fanfics, you should use a non-
formatting, 7-bit ASCII text editor.  Be it Notepad,
VI, or edlin (I'm kidding), stick to a text only
program.

And here, I disagree.  For the past year and a half, I have written all of
my fanfics in Microsoft Word.  There are a few caveats, of course:  you have
to turn off "smart quotes", you have to disable much of Word's "auto-format
as you type" features, and you must save the first time as "Text Only".  It
helps if you choose a mono-spaced font, too, such as Courier.  If you take
those elementary precautions, Word makes an excellent text editor.
Spell-checking on the fly is particularly valuable.  I very much appreciate
that all I have to do is type in an approxiamation of how a word should be
spelled, and up pops a list of alternatives if I've guessed wrong.

For text wrapping, I depend on Microsoft Outlook.  I've told Outlook that
any outgoing email message should be wrapped to 70 characters.  So when
emailing a fanfic, I open it in word, copy the text, paste it into an
Outlook email message, and send.  Outlook does the line-wrapping for me, and
I've never had a problem.  It helps that I write "block" paragraphs, with no
indentations and a blank line between paragraphs.

I agree that you shouldn't send a ".doc" file to the FFML, but you can still
use an advanced word processor to create simple text files.

Shunsuke

-Richard