Okay, took a day longer than expected (RL in the shape of Euro 2000
intervened ;) but V0.7 of The Fan Fiction Formatting Tool (3FT) is now
up on my site. As well as all the new functions that were suggested the
executable and the source file are now distributed under the terms of
the GNU General Public License. This will hopefully lead to versions
for different OSs, additional improvements, etc...
Find it at:
http://www.gameart.com/4ca/3ft.zip
...and the documentation is at:
http://www.gameart.com/4ca/3ft-readme.txt
The complete feature list of 3FT V0.7 is:
* Wrap lines at or before the maximum line length set without
splitting words unless it cannot be avoided (IE: if the word in
question is longer than the maximum line length).
* Recognise hyphens as the ideal splitting point for a word.
* Convert tabs to spaces, formatting to columns.
* Strip extraneous space characters from the ends of lines.
* Strip spaces from the beginning of a line only if they've been
wordwrapped. Tabs are handled separately, so the indenting in your
scripts is safe. ;)
* Cope as much as possible with those big long lines of hyphens and
other characters that some writers use to split paragraphs up with.
* Strip all control characters, such as bells (^G), with the
exception of newlines.
* Force the text in the file to conform to your choice of encoding.
For more information try http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8859.html. The
current options are:
* CP1252 - The windows standard. Allows a lot of the characters,
such as the curly speech marks so beloved of Microsoft Word, that
cause unintelligible gibberish on most non-windows systems. Try
not to use this one. Please.
* ISO-8859-1 - Otherwise known as Latin-1, this is the REAL
standard. Gets rid of the Window-specific characters whilst
still allowing accented characters. Should be acceptable on all
systems. Use this one, it's the default.
* 7-Bit US ASCII - Older standard. For when you want to be REALLY
sure it's going to look the same on all systems. Doesn't allow
anything other than the basic Roman alphabet, in other words
newlines, spaces, !"#$%&'()*+,./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQ
RSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~- and . Ranma
authors, note lack of the "half" character, which will be replaced
with "1/2". ;) Only for the paranoid.
* Unformat a file, in other words remove all single linebreaks. This
is for people who maintain web archives and who want to use
proportional fonts. Has a good guess as to the author's preferred
number of spaces after a full stop (I usually use two), although
that won't matter if you're planning on converting the file to HTML
- HTML files always put only one space after a full stop unless you
use a control code ( ) to tell it otherwise. ;)
Huge thanks to everyone who mailed me about this. I can't thank you all
enough. Hope the program and it's source is of some use to everyone.
Now, must get back to The Misadventures of Tron Bonne and that newly-
arrived DNA^2 tape... ;)
Cheers,
- Subi
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