Once upon a time David Homerick shaped the electrons to say...
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.
Why not, all of NXE has been written in emacs on Linux. ;-) Actually, for the
past several years all of our work has been done in emacs - or nearly all.
I guess I should qualify that and say 'to my knowledge' - Ben and I use it,
and I know some of the others do. But it is quite possible that others use
different systems - we just get contributions as ASCII text to edit into
continuity.
Now, we have used other systems - The original UF stories were written in
Professional Write for DOS. I still have floppies with files in that format
from that era. Some were also written in Word Perfect. PW was Ben's fav
on the PC, WP was mine. I have a story I started writing in 1995 in WP
which I'm getting back to work on, now in MS-Word. I'll probably finish it
in Word, then dump the whole thing into ASCII and clean it up for posting in
emacs.
Off hand I know we've used Professional Write, WordPerfect, MS-Word, GEO Works,
NotePad, DOS Edit, vi, and emacs to author our fics. Running on MS-DOS,
Win3.11, WfWG3.11, Win95, and many flavors of UNIX. Now that I think of it,
I think Ben might have done some work on an old Mac we have to play with.
They've been posted to USEnet with rn/trn/strn - and sometimes with direct
calls to inews. During collaboration we usually mail them around with Elm,
but I'm pretty sure we have people using pine, vmail, and Eudora.
Everyone knows we're professional geeks, right? ;-)
My point of all this is that each of these packaegs and operating systems
have their own quirks - different newline handling, special characters, etc.
None of them are dead ends, it just takes a little effort to smooth it out.
Save things as ASCII text - that eliminates the special fonts and characters.
Use Courier 10 fixed width fonts when editing - then you don't have the
problems of your line wrpaps shifting when saving from a proportional font to
ASCII. I find Courier 10 does a good job of emulating VT100 ASCII spacing
in most word processors.
New authors make mistakes - it happens. One of the thorns in my side as
moderator was the Macintosh. It LOVES to use dumb 'smartfonts' that result
in bogus characters for quotes, aostrophes, etc. It was a regular thing,
I was able to recognize a Mac author immediately when I got one of these.
Authors should take a bit more care - use a test newsgroup to see how it
looks. Open the file in a plain editor and not a word processor and see
how it is formatted. Editing and formatting is the grunt work of writing -
but it is important. You can have the best product in the world - but if
you can't market it, no one will care. With writing the appearance is part
of the marketing.
In the early days there was a scarce supply of fanfic, so fans tended to read
everything they could. These days there is so much that people tend to be more
picky - and if you don't make a good first impression you are less likely to
sustain readership.
-MZ