They come dancing 'round the window, like they're peeking through the glass...

[rolanni]

...They hover for a moment, then they fall on past.*

We got up early-ish in anticipation of the snow. Steve made a wonderful potato-and-sausage breakfast, put the towels in to wash, fed the birds, and started baking bread. My contribution to domestic productivity being the appreciative consumption of breakfast, folding the towels when they were dry, and alphabetizing the hundreds of tracking slips associated with the Great Eidolon Mailing. Those chores done, Hexapuma and I retired to the living room, I to read Fledgling, he to produce Sleep Rays.

Mozart is on the bed, also engaged in Sleep Ray production, while Scrabble is in Steve's office, chaperoning Win Ton and Theo.

It is, as I type, 2 degrees above zero(F) and snowing. We're told to expect on the order of 18 inches of snow -- a number that has remained disturbingly steady for the last 24 hours. On the one hand, I sure could use a snow-day tomorrow. On the other hand, I really would like it if the lights stayed on.

I did go back and plant that hook in Fledgling which added a handful of words -- nothing to signify.

As I'm going through the manuscript, I find that, not only is the spacing is Utterly Borked throughout, but the fonts skip from one to another, random as lambs in the springtime. Not best pleased with Open Office 3.0, me. I suppose, in some ways, my typewriter consciousness has finally caught up with me. On a typewriter -- here's a picture of a machine remarkably like the one I learned to type on for those of you too young to recall "typewriters."

With a typewriter, I say, one sets the line spacing by means of a ratchet. You may vary the line spacing within the document by manipulating the ratchet, but once the spacing is set for, say, double-space, it stays that way until you change it. None of this single, double, space-and-a-half at whim nonsense. I have always treated a word processor like an absurdly complex typewriter. I set my parameters -- in the case of this particular manuscript, double spaced, inch-round margins, Arial font (I know, I know, but it's easy for me to read) -- and I expect them to stay that way. I am not at all pleased to find that Evil Gremlins get into the file while it's closed and play skittles with the product.

I don't want to have to set paragraph styles every dern time I go to a new paragraph. I. Just. Want. To. Type. And to have what I type remain as I typed it, until I decide to change or delete it. This seems so simple and basic that it's Even More Infuriating when it doesn't work.

Ah, well... Today's task is the fast-read. After I pull the Brilliant Resolutions to those two plot-points out of my hat, then's the time to spell-check, fix the fracking formatting and put the book on a bus to our editor.

Where I hope it will arrive in readable condition.

---------
*Rachel's Song, James McMurtry

Comments

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

One of the many reasons I prefer WordPerfect to Word is that it doesn't faff around with that formatting-by-paragraph nonsense if you don't want it to. (You can do Paragraph Styles if you want to, but it's not obligatory . . . and no matter how many times I hear people tell me that Styles are the neatest thing since sliced bread, the explanations fail to convince.)

[spiritdancer]

You took the words out of my mouth :-)

And some folks I deal with ask me why I keep using WP - my response it "I can get exactly what I want in a fraction of the time, and then I can convert it to whatever you'd like. You deal with it from there!" I really ought to ask them how much they'd like to pay me to get something "prettified" :-)

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I still have WordPerfect on this machine, and I'm getting aggravated enough that I may just throw the manuscript into it, Reveal Codes and Get On With Things.

I'd gone to Open Office because it was less intrusive than WordPerfect, but it appears that Open Office has fallen into the More Like Office = Good trap.

I wish they'd leave the stuff that works alone, yanno? There are plenty of broken things that need fixing.

[sraun]

Conceptually, I think Styles are really neat. They mean I pre-define all the formatting I'm going to use, and then I never have to worry about being consistent.

In practice, they're kind of awful. Mostly because there are two schools of formatting - the Styles 'hide it in the paragraph marker' and the older stream-based 'here's a start code, keep going until you see an end code'.

If you're using Styles, the only character-based formatting you should do it bold/ italic/ underline within a paragraph. (Or similar formatting - another that comes to mind is URL formatting.) Practically all your formatting should be done using Styles. The only time I've every seen this done is when the document is being worked on only by a Word maven - no one else is allowed to touch it.

The moment you start mixing the two philosophies, document maintainability goes through the floor. And no program (that I know of) that does Styles provides a good way to strip out selected formatting. The only thing I've found in Word usually sets everything to the Default Paragraph format - roughly equivalent to 'save as TXT and start over'. But it isn't reliable!

From a corporate point of view, Styles should be a god-send. Define the styles, publish them in NORMAL.DOT (or whatever your word-processing program's equivalent is), and then you have a nicely defined corporate document format. Microsoft pushes (or at least used to) this as a positive feature of MS Office. But it only works if you go and train everyone in the company to use Styles efficiently, and have an enforcement policy about it. "Do it this way, or redo it", and make it stick. No one does that. And it would make my life so much easier if they did! (My day job is in-house computer support for a large company. Trouble-shooting MS Office is one of my tasks. It isn't as bad here as it was at previous jobs, but I think that's a job mix rather than a corporate standards & training thing.)

[kalimeg.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it would work to Select All and then set the spacing. No idea, but it might work.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Yep, that works. Until I close the file. When I reopen it, it's borked again.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Are you saving it as an OO document (.odf or something like tha) or as a Word document (.doc)? Not that I've ever had any trouble with either, but it can sometimes get weird font settings when importing from Word format if it can't find the correct fonts.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Writing in and saving as rtf, for that's what the editor will eventually want it delivered as, and I thought, "Why put more steps in-between Then and Now?"

[jiffysquid.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it helps to ignore the formatting until the end of writing a document, Select the whole entire text, and change the paragraph/line spacing/indents/etc. all at once.

I haven't used Open Office in a long time. Last I checked, Star Office was pretty good and still free, and didn't have many of the problems you describe: It did have some minor compatibility issues with Word documents, which was the sticking point for me when I needed to be able to edit things both at home and at work which required Word.

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Star Office and Open Office are essentially the same, IIRC.

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

My recollection from the previous time we had this complaint was that she's loading and saving in .RTF. Thus implying that OO 3.0 has a bug in its .RTF handling (said bug not appearing in OO 2.x).

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Yah, and it may well come from us writing the thing originally on at least six different computers, each with slightly different versions of the same programs.

[sraun]

Hmm - that generates two thoughts. One of which is really obnoxious, and the other less so.

The less so thought - have you tried changing the Default Paragraph Style for the document? It's under Format, Styles (AKA F11), highlight "Default", right-click on it and select Modify. Looks like what she wants is on the "Indents & Spacing" tab.

The more so thought - toss out all the formatting and start over. Save the document as a .TXT file. That would get rid of all the junk introduced by the previous programs. The downside - this does loose all formatting, even bold, italics, and underline. It might be a pain to find all that and reproduce it - but is it less of a pain?

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I'm resisting the "strip all the formatting and let Ghod sort them out" solution, just because -- ouch. Slightly less of a pain is the "paste it into WordPerfect and strip out the codes by hand" solution. But, still.

The less so thought - have you tried changing the Default Paragraph Style for the document?

The default paragraph style is double-spaced, Arial.

[sraun]

Well, the paste into WordPerfect may work - it'd be interesting to see how the WP interpreter deals with whatever it is that OO gives it.

I can sympathize about not wanting to strip out all the formatting.

Ouch! re: default paragraph style = what you want already. I suspected that you'd already done that, but tossed it out just in case.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

it'd be interesting to see how the WP interpreter deals with whatever it is that OO gives it.

Shut it down completely. Very annoying. to say the least.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

A less drastic thought than some: try saving as OO native format after formatting into a new file, then open that file. I don't know what it does with RTF, but I remember looking at that format quite a time ago and deciding that no way was I going to try to write a reader/converter for it because every version of MS word produced a different version (and none of it is properly documented). I would only use RTF as an intermediate if the destination only accepts that, OO's export as Word (2000) seems to work fine as far as I can see (I generally export as Word or Excel as appropriate, only once have I found a problem and that was because I had used some OO specific features and they didn't translate to the MS format).

WordStar, anyone?

[(Anonymous)]

I guess I'm the last dinosaur using WordStar (the DOS version, not WSW!). The problems Rolanni is having don't always go away when WS format is translated into MS Word (haven't tried Open Office), but I've generally had good luck. There is also an add-in command set for Word (up to 2000, maybe later) that duplicates the WS command set almost perfectly, including some, but not all of, the formatting commands.

Jack Barnes

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

I love-love-love-love your writing. I hate-hate-hate-hate-HATE Arial. If I could it would not exist on any computer I use... (My vision is astigmatic, and sans serif fonts, particularly loathsome-abomination-from-hell-Arial, are bad news for me.)

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

(Regarding word processors.... they're all lame these days. Word makes incredible messes when it crashes (the sight of 43 recovered windows reopened and the extension put on some of them being .asd, is something I wish up people I dislike... put tables into tables and do somethign in the table in the table and then do control z and control y too quickly and Word can get extremely unhappy.... )and believes that compatibility is somethat that belongs maybe on on match.com perhaps. Open Office has quirks and no sane draft mode (space on the display for page top and bottom margins is not usually usefully when attempting to write and being more concerned about content than format while writing....) WordPerfect decided some years ago to turn into an appalling bad copy of Word.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I hate-hate-hate-hate-HATE Arial.

Yes, many people do. However, you don't have to write in it, or read in it. Most books are set in serif types.

I see much easier when there's less clutter. Serif, to me, is unnecessary clutter.

Funny how we're all different isn't it?