I'm not sure if this question has been addressed before (memory suggests yes, but a quick archive search says no), so if there's already a thread about this, can someone point me there?

That having been said... what text editors do the Eyrie crew use? I ask because it is stupendously time-consuming and frustrating to manually insert line breaks into unformatted text. I generally find myself settling for HTMLizing the whole thing.

Of course, if the answer to this is to manually wrap the text, then I suppose I'll have to seek out reserves of patience I know I probably don't have.

>That having been said... what text editors do the Eyrie crew use?

I use GNU Emacs 19.34, and have for quite a long time.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Do a search for '3FT', the Fan Fiction Format Tool. It's very useful for a number of situations as you describe.

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"I find your lack of clue disturbing."

Heh. I'm not part of the crew per sey, but I've had similar experainces. What I found was that with a little bit of nudging, I could get Word and Word Perfect to do most of the work for me.

The secret is to use a fixed width font, in my case Courier New 12 point, which gives me 10 charecters to the inch. Then I set my margins to give me 7.2 inch lines. Finally, I save it as either Dos text (with line breaks) for Word, or Ascii Dos Text for Word Perfect, and it comes out just about perfect.

For other occasions, I also have a nice little utility that a comrade on a Sailor Moon FanFiction Mailing List came up with called WinHelper that does the same thing. Its rather similar to the 3FT program that others have mentioned.

>
>For other occasions, I also have a nice little utility that a comrade
>on a Sailor Moon FanFiction Mailing List came up with called WinHelper
>that does the same thing. Its rather similar to the 3FT program that
>others have mentioned.

Searching from "WinHelper" turns up many sites about a mIRC trojan of the same name. I doubt this is the one you speak of.

Can you point me in a site/person who can help?

>>
>>For other occasions, I also have a nice little utility that a comrade
>>on a Sailor Moon FanFiction Mailing List came up with called WinHelper
>>that does the same thing. Its rather similar to the 3FT program that
>>others have mentioned.
>
>Searching from "WinHelper" turns up many sites about a mIRC trojan of
>the same name. I doubt this is the one you speak of.
>
>Can you point me in a site/person who can help?

mmm... Dunno. The program I have was originally written by Andrew McKesson, and he hung out on the SMFHQ ML. You might try searching on his name and see if that gets you anywhere. If not, I'd just go with the 3FT program mentioned earlier. Also, you can check out openoffice.org and get a copy of open office, which is freeware and has 99.9% of the same funtionality of Word Perfect and Word.

Courier new 12 point with .6" margins will give you your 70-72 charecter line. Unfortunatly, Wordpad won't save the text with line breaks; so you'll need to use another program be it 3ft, or something similar, to wrap the document at 70 columns

>That having been said... what text editors do the Eyrie crew use? I
>ask because it is stupendously time-consuming and frustrating to
>manually insert line breaks into unformatted text. I generally find
>myself settling for HTMLizing the whole thing.

I'm not "Eyrie crew", but if you use Word, setting line breaks is easy. I do the document with Courier 10 font settings, set the right margin where I want the breaks, and then save the document as a text file using the "text only with line breaks" option

Regards,
Jeanne

New Address: jhedge@rcn.com
http://www.jhedge.com
Anime/Manga Forum: http://go.compuserve.com/Anime

>
>I'm not "Eyrie crew", but if you use Word, setting line breaks is
>easy. I do the document with Courier 10 font settings, set the right
>margin where I want the breaks, and then save the document as a text
>file using the "text only with line breaks" option

Problem is, I don't have Word. (I might get it one of these days, but considering that the computer I use most often is primarily a gaming one, and thus is not hooked up to a printer, that day is long in the future. Besides, the one computer with Word that I have crashes sixty percent of the time.)

I do have Wordpad, which I just discovered (yes, I'm a luser) can open *.doc files. I'm not sure how much like Word it is, though. Is there any way to do that same trick in Wordpad?

I have WinXP (and thus no MSDOS), and I'd prefer freeware. Are there any options for me in that case?

>
>
>Regards,
>Jeanne
>

>I have WinXP (and thus no MSDOS), and I'd prefer freeware. Are there
>any options for me in that case?

http://www.openoffice.org/

I stopped using MS-Office/Word on my personal machines a while back.

LAST EDITED ON 03-05-03 AT 02:47 AM (EST)
 
>>I have WinXP (and thus no MSDOS), and I'd prefer freeware. Are there
>>any options for me in that case?
>
>http://www.openoffice.org/
>
>I stopped using MS-Office/Word on my personal machines a while back.

I second Zoner's recommendation. Open Office is the only office suite I choose to keep on my machine. (I hardly consider GNU Office to be a "suite", and KOffice is a royal pain in the tuchis.) The only drawback is the download time (it's around 100MB), but if you have a broadband connection, it's not so bad. In fact, I keep one copy for my Linux system and one for my Windoze sytsem, so that I can edit files no matter which is booted up. Unlike Word, Open Office files use the same format no matter which operating system you use.

>I'm not "Eyrie crew", but if you use Word, setting line breaks is
>easy. I do the document with Courier 10 font settings, set the right
>margin where I want the breaks, and then save the document as a text
>file using the "text only with line breaks" option
>
>

12 point is better, IMO, cause you get 10 charecters per inch instead of 12 with 10 point type. Plus my tired old eyes can read it better. That plus .6" margins works perfectly for me.