Touchy? Maybe, but I'd be a bit miffed if I were in his position as well.

Black Aeronaut Technologies Creative aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer "To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News of this kind a danish requires."

Pfft. M-q, baby. :-)

Slarti

Yup. One keystroke.

Recent Emacs even has a minor mode where it acts like the text is softwrapped while you're typing, but the file on disk still has hard carriage returns. Which is as it should be.

The text is also more or less in the correct form for directly processing with latex - it only takes a few minutes to add the relevant markup for a more or less faithful rendition.

But aside from printing better (and at a more readable 65 columns), there's no particular advantage to doing so. Plain text is perfectly adequate to this task.

I used regexps in vim (I have a 74-line file named Symphony.vim I !source) to fix things like ``quotes'' and \emph{anything with _underscore_ emphasis}. I then center and
\verb|THE DATELINES|\\
and format the end credits by hand.

Then I do a complete proofread. My original goal was to have a set of cafepress books, but really, I just like having the PDFs around. They look much better printed, but when I'm reading at a computer screen, I usually stick with text, at 80x25, in my standard console font, just like I did ten years ago. :)

If anyone wants the files, PM me, or some such. Ben has said he doesn't mind me making them, or even making them available (though there was no real interest when I first mentioned it), but he did _NOT_ want to hear about it. If one has a spelling error that was fixed in a later version of the text, if I manage to set your computer on fire with a malformed PDF, whatever; don't bug Gryphon. ;)

--Maeglin

Centring can be more or less automated by throwing a center environment around any line that begins with a space and does not begin with eight spaces or a tab, and around any /* ... */.

Centred credits are handled by that. Two-column credits are wrapped with a table environment, with column 39 changed from a space to an & and \\ added to the end of every line.

That should more or less automate the whole thing, with only a little nudge needed on the column credits. Then you just have to clean up while proofreading.

Gryphon's text is so regular that it's very easy to typeset automatically. I'd script the process if I thought anybody cared.

That being on nice, 8x11.5" paper, prepunched for three-ring binders, and bound in clear-cover portfolios so as to have a nice cover sheet on top. (Because with some of these stories, the titles would not always be on the first page. ;)

I wouldn't do this with everything. Just some of the major works like Twilight, SotS, etc.

Black Aeronaut Technologies Creative aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer "To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News of this kind a danish requires."

Black Aeronaut Technologies Creative aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer "To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News of this kind a danish requires."

Hell, it took me at least that many to *read* it. :)

To address the original poster: as someone who's stepped on that particular landmine in the past, all I can say is Gryphon has his reasons (and for what it's worth, I think they're good ones), at least one of which you can find preserved for history under the CSRANTronix portion of this site. (Rant 08, 4/26/2001, here).

--sofaspud
--

Hope you're better,
t.

Trigger Argee
trigger_argee@hotmail.com
Manon, Maccadon, Orado, etc.
Denton, never leave home without it.

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." - HST