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

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.

<g> If you spend a bit of time working with it, it can be even better. 
It's three in the morning, I type in "Ramna" for the umpteenth time, it 
fixes it. Heck, my prereaders haven't had to correct a spelling mistake 
in... oh, I dunno, 200k of text or so.

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.

Or, you can pick a monospace font, like Courier, and save "Text Only 
with Line Breaks". (Well, it works on Office 97, anyway. ;p)

I myself do NOT turn off the autoformatting; I do print my fic out on 
occasion, for people in the local club and such, and it does look a lot 
better in Word. When I'm done, I save as text (with line breaks) and 
open the text file up in Write; replace the smart quotes with normal 
ones, and fix the ellipses (I use a lot of ... in my writing) and you 
have a good text file.

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.

Save your prereaders time and hassle. <g> Of course, this assumes you 
already have a copy; I certainly wouldn't plunk down the cash for one 
just for fanfic writing.

Andy



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