Timewaster's Guide Archive
Local Authors => Reading Excuses => Topic started by: Chaos on May 18, 2010, 05:40:45 AM
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Friendly reminder! Remember to save your submissions in .doc file format (if you can't open it, there's www.openoffice.org. Also, how is it you are surviving in the 21st century without an office program?), manuscript format for the text (double spaced, Times New Roman or Courier font, but above all, consistency in formatting), but perhaps my biggest pet peeve is when people don't format their file names correctly. We've all managed to get the email subject lines perfect so I'd really like everyone to have their usernames on the file itself. Heck, cloning your subject header may work just as well.
Hopefully I'm not being too crazy here with the submission guidelines, but it is very important to have consistency. Above that, each of these guidelines has a rationale to it. .doc's are (unfortunately) the standard of saving office files. Double spacing is for readability. The reason I'm being picky with file names is because when you download a bunch of submissions, I now need to sort through them all. It's really, really nice to have a name with each file so I don't have to keep looking at the email.
Thank you everyone who already does this :)
(Also, most all of these things are in the guidelines outlined in the "Welcome to Reading Excuses" topic, so this isn't terribly surprising. Just wanted to make sure everyone remembers!)
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Plain text forever!
Also, I've asked before (though not to you), but what are you doing downloading submissions? Make a rule to sort the emails into a folder, and never worry about filenames again.
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Eventually I download them all and place them into my "Reading Excuses" folder on my computer. It has a separate folder for each author, so I can keep submissions straight that way, rather than by submission date.
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I agree that that's useful. In fact, I sort my RE email folder by author, not date.
Don't get me wrong - I'll oblige and put my handle in my filenames. It's just that it seems more sensible to me to use your email client to organize your emails than it does to expend energy trying to convince a group of people to change their behavior.
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I'll be the first to admit I'm a bit of a control freak in that regard. Personally, I just like not having to rely upon the internet to download the files and have it locally. In that case, good filenames are your friends.
Some people do format the filenames, some don't. We'll get it consistent eventually :P
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.rtf (plain text) should also work fine for file format, I believe. Everyone should be able to open that (and for those of us who are fond of MS comments to critique, I'm almost certain that this will still work).
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Please. RTF is NOT plain text. ;D
Also: oh. You must be using webmail. I find it hard to recall that most of the world is crazy, and doesn't mind reading its email in a browser. Personally, I couldn't stand that. I need my dedicated, desktop mail client, which, by virtue of its nature as a desktop application, downloads all mail I receive into a local archive. If I were a webmail serf, I'd probably download RE submissions too.
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Just to chime in here (didn't notice this thread had gotten responses):
The reason *I* download the actual files and store them is because you can't add line-edits otherwise. Well, sure, you *can* (although my email client opens any file read-only, so technically I can't anyway), but then you can't save it to email it back to the person. And then I keep the files around, just in case someone wants to question an edit in the future. It also lets me go back to the earlier version when someone asks "Did the changes I made help?" So being able to pull up the old version with my edits, to refresh me on what I was thinking the first time I reviewed it, can be very helpful (and yes, I *technically* could pull up my Sent folder, find the person, and pull the file from there, but hey, I'm a digital pack-rat, and not all people may keep their Sent history like I do).
I could care less about how the files look on my server, as long as your email subject lines say the working title and part name/number. I can run sorts and filters and searches galore to find certain people if I need to.
I think the real issue here is that rules (no matter how loosely defined) are still rules, and it's only common courtesy to follow them.
As per the document format discussion, .doc files are supported with Wordpad in Windows Vista and later, so it almost should be the common denominator. Yes, RTF can work, except some people get mangled RTF output when they try to save it as such, and it's worse than no formatting at all. Plain text is just not an option for people-- most people don't even remember the days when you formatted text by doing things like /italics/ and *bold* and _underline_. Not to mention the fact that you can't set line spacing with .txt files. I send all my line-edits back in .doc format, with the notion that if someone really can't read it, they'll let me know. I have yet to receive any complaints.
So that's my 2 cents for today... man, I need to quit spending so much money.
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This is why I prefer to write in plain text. (http://ryanballantyne.name/2010/05/the-search-for-semantic-writing/)
TL;DR: You may have noticed that my last submission was in RTF. I didn't author it in RTF, but in plain text with some simple markup, which Ulysses (a writing app) converted to RTF for me. It could as easily have done PDF, or LaTeX, or even .doc. But I didn't have to deal with any formatting directly, just making sure my documents are properly structured and marked up. I find this freaking awesome, and never want to write anything in a word processor ever again.
However, I don't have any issue reading files written in a word processor. I didn't mean my "plain text forever" comment to be taken as an admonishment that everyone should send me only plain text, but rather that that's what I prefer to use when writing.
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I do write a lot of dialogue in plain text, and virtually all of my notes are plain text. I *really* like Notepad++ for that.
Needless to say, when actual manuscript writing, I like it to be double spaced and I like to actually see my italics. Using tags isn't the same.
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Honestly, I'd almost prefer to *write* in LaTeX, because I can do much more than I ever could in .doc. If only I could just send you .tex files.
I write most of my stuff in a text editor very similar to what this forum's post system has. It supports pretty much anything that HTML allows, and it does so visually (it doesn't use bbcode). If I really wanted to, I could even throw in LaTeX if I had a formula that I just *had* to get in (you know, for all those crazy magic integrals). I used to work with LaTeX formatting college-level science textbooks, so I don't
It's also stored on my server, which has a very good chance of surviving anything short of the entire state of Utah exploding (between the live copy in Salt Lake and the backups in Logan). On top of that, it supports revision control, so I can even go back and look at previous versions if I want to.
If I could manage to find the time to finish it, I think it would be a very great method to resolve this entire problem, by creating a common interface for people to use. Hell, I could even support Ulysses' input methods alongside the default one. Multiple interfaces is just a matter of conversion. The backend stores it as valid XHTML to make it easier to display, but two-way conversion is easy (since it's valid). As it is, you can copy and paste directly from word, oo.org, and wordpad already, and it preserves all the formatting it can (which is pretty much everything). OO.org is actually semantic in nature, if you actually use the styles instead of just increasing font sizes for headers. In your article, you specifically say that HTML wouldn't be good for writing stories. I'd beg to differ, but then again, I can write it in my sleep. Converting from HTML to PDF and RTF is easy. Word's .doc format is a little more difficult because Microsoft likes it that way, but you could use the new XML-based word files pretty easily (since it's practically HTML to start). Openoffice has a command line utility to change files to .odt, or there are classes written in PHP to do the job as well. LaTeX... well, anything can be represented in that, if you have the ambition.
I feel the same way you do, though. I develop web sites for a living, so I'm *very* familiar with semantical systems. Every page I write is valid XHTML. Any and all display is controlled by CSS. I can't stand people who just throw everything into tables and put font tags all over the place. :)
It does seem like this thread has gone on a bit of a tangent. Guess it's back to work for me. :)
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I on the other hand am very fond of ODT format with Open Office. But it will save into .doc. RTF it doesn't do so well. One reason for liking odt so much is that on average the same fully formatted text is 1/10th the size of RTF. But RTF is still the most portable.
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Please. RTF is NOT plain text. ;D
Forgive me. I misspoke. :P
I'm with Chaos--I'm too used to standard manuscript format now to work another way. I like double spacing and being able to see my formatting instead of just the tags. (And I shudder to think of writing out <p></p> tags for every paragraph. (Shut up. I'm not a programmer. HTML's the only markup language I know. :P)) But I can certainly see the attraction of markup languages in some cases.
For instance. You know how some publishers want italics to be in italics, and other publishers still want italics to be underlined? Give it a class! Change the style! Done! Whee!
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I like proprietary markup systems. I use my own. It makes final decisions of naming and various other aspects easier. You can wait till you know your characters better then go back and work through the markups.
However, I have to admit that where a convention exists, I think it's pretty important to stick to it. The conventional markup for emphasis is to lead and trail the text with an asterisk, for underlining it is to use the '_" underline character to lead and trail (and occasionally to fill spaces in) the text. I'm not talking about the output (underlines vs italics) just markup. It would be nice if in a given document either markup, underlining, or italics were used. But not all caps (unless you use "small caps") or non standard markup.
Another standard markup that I find helpful it to replace the parentheses in parenthetical passages with '--' --double dashes that are not spaced from the text-- like this.
I'm not suggesting we need a style guide, 'cause that would be stifling. Just making a couple of suggestions that will help me when reading your submissions.
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That markup system hasn't been used since the days of the typewriter. We should all have editors that can do .doc files, so you can (and should) use the real thing (italics, underlining, etc.).
Also, double dashes are considered an em dash, which is exactly what you should be using for parenthetical notation, provided you can't use an actual em dash. Word and Openoffice auto-replace it automatically, provided you're using a closed set (no spaces). If you use spaces between, it becomes an en dash instead.
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true except: 1) some people are using plain text editors 2) I've seen recent examples where someone was NOT using modern .rtf/sgml styling and instead used a completely proprietary markup for things like emphasis.
So it *is* relevant. ;)
Of course there's always the option of using AWK or sed markup then running the pipe before submitting. . . .
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Plain text doesn't mean 7-bit ASCII. There are dozens of better encodings, and UTF-8 supersedes them all for most uses.
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um Ryan? What prompted my comment was your ++text++ notation . . . .
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this was an interesting conversation and I really dont know anything about your submissions or whatever, just wanted to chime in here:
RTF is "rich text format" and is a Microsoft proprietary standard. Many text editors can read it, but not all of them. It is especially difficult on people who use Macs or Unix based systems (like Linux). Also, some internet servers still dont "understand" it and garble it. even when I worked for Microsoft, I recommended against RTF and I am going to do so again.
also, for those who are using Office 2007, keep in mind that the default save setting is DOCX format, which can only be read by those using Office 2007 or older versions of Office with a 2007 converter. WordPad and other simple Document readers will not be able to open them.
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Actually the wordpad in Windows 7 at least can open .docx, as can Openoffice, which is free for everyone (permission to install notwithstanding).
I usually don't have a problem with RTF files (in Linux, using Oo.org), until the other person's exporter munges it. Textedit on OS X should read .rtf just fine, too (although maybe not some of the newest crap Microsoft decided the format needed). It's supposed to be a very stable format, and it's human readable if you don't mind a bunch of control codes in the way. Of course, MS often likes to change things just to slow competitors down, and this format is certainly no stranger to this concept. So, .doc is easier, because its support is practically guaranteed by just about any OS in some way.
I wouldn't even have a problem with straight .txt files, as long as they didn't want any real formatting. Just double enter for each paragraph and I'm good to go. I'll just open it in OO and save it as .doc so I can enter notes.
This original thread came up because of recent non-standard submissions. I think the overwhelming response is "We'd prefer you send us things in .doc format, because practically anyone *can* read it. We don't care what you write it in, since there are a lot of different solutions to that. And please name your email title and document using a standard convention, which is actually listed in the rules for this board." Anything else in this thread is just a bunch of "well, my way of doing things is..." which only helps someone else if they're interested in a potentially better way to write their stuff. Oh yeah, and all of our technical knowledge about why things suck. :)
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um Ryan? What prompted my comment was your ++text++ notation . . . .
Shoot, that's a Ulysses thing and it shouldn't have gotten through the exporter. :\
(Ulysses' markup is customizable, but I had no problem with the ++ notation and so just went with it.)
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The concerns over rtf mangling are a good point. The problem is that MS .DOC format was until recently just an extended proprietary rtf. "Real" rtf is superior for sharing files around because it doesn't allow for embedding scripts. That limits the opportunity for sharing virii. But like so many formats it grossly inflates the document, nowhere near as badly MS Word formats, however.
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What font do you OO users use? ???
My version does not have either Courier or Times New Roman.
Derby
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Solution: Update your version.
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Solution: Update your version.
Thanks for the reply and suggestion. However, according to the Synaptic Package Manager, I have the latest version installed.
Looking closer I realize that I DO have the Courier 10 Pitch but that is monospaced and I really don't like to use monospacing.
I was wondering if Nimbus Roman No9 L is considered a good substitute for Times New Roman? ???
Derby
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Install the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package
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Install the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package
Thanks, lethalfalcon, I did install the suggested package and Times New Roman appears to now be my default font. :)
I can now convert my micro story that I'll be submitting on Monday.
Besides being new to Reading Excuses, I fairly new to Linux.
Derby