Hi everyone,
Tim is absolutely right on several fronts. First of all, it's true
that some people are posting in non-ASCII formats, or using
non-standard characters in their stories. These occasionally will not
display properly, and thay make reading a story bloody damn difficult.
He is also correct in that there is an easy way to produce ASCII text
out of Word. You can even wrap it at 70 characters.
The most important thing to do is make sure that you've taken steps to
preserve formatting. Make sure you've replaced all bold and italic
words with appropriate flankers. Common replacements for bold include
asterisks (*) and underscores (_), and extended segments in italics
(usually characters' thoughts) are often flanked by brackets (<> or
[]) or underscores. Try not to flank extended italic passages with
apostrophes (') as this is actually a valid way to express spoken
dialogue.
Also, make sure you replace all nonstandard characters (long dashes,
accented letters) with plain equivalents. You may need to turn off
some autoformatting options to do all this.
Then convert your entire story into 10 point Courier New font (this is
a default plain text font). Type a row of 70 x's, and go into "Normal
View". Hit Ctrl+A to select the entire text. Click on the triangle at
the right edge of the upper ruler and move it in so that it is just
barely beyond the final x in your row. Your text should now be wrapped
at seventy characters.
Go to the "File" menu and select "Save As..." When the window to save
your file comes up, select "Text only with line breaks" as the file
format to use. Type in your file's name, and then save it. Close the
file and reopen it to see the results of the save--Word will not
convert a file to line-break format while it's open.
That's what I do, at least.
Sparky
*********
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."--Isaac Asimov
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