The New Bedlam Project

[Rev. Austin]

Reading through the guidelines again, what does this mean?

First line indent at .5 using paragraph format only: do not use tabs, or space bar.

[rsmccoy]

I need to ad this to my guidelines.

In MS Word, you select all and choose Format Paragraph. Under Special, you choose First Line and put it at .05 inches.

People indent paragraphs in a lot of ways. Many people use tab or the space bar. When publisher go to reformat the story for posting or printing, we have to take out the formating. If you use spaces or tab button, it takes a lot of effort to remove all that space. If you use the method listed above, we can Select All, Format Paragraph and change the Special to None and get rid of them all in seconds.

[Ed]

I didn't know that - I've always used the tab button if they wanted indents. Good to know. Thanks, Scott

[Pharosian]

I need to ad this to my guidelines.

In MS Word, you select all and choose Format Paragraph. Under Special, you choose First Line and put it at .05 inches.

If you're going to add it to your guidelines, you might want to make sure you get the decimal in the right place. 

[Ed]

That would be a pretty small indent

This is where it's good to work in millimetres. Call it 16mm, but I doubt MS Word gives the option. They probably work in metric, but metres instead of millimetres, making it 0.016m

[Pharosian]

America is a lot farther from going metric than Britain, but even I know that there are 25.4 mm per inch. So how does .5 of an inch get to be 16 mm? 

[Ed]

Oops - I'm thinking about pipe sizes. It's actually more like 13mm, isn't it?

[Rev. Austin]

I need to ad this to my guidelines.

In MS Word, you select all and choose Format Paragraph. Under Special, you choose First Line and put it at .05 inches.

People indent paragraphs in a lot of ways. Many people use tab or the space bar. When publisher go to reformat the story for posting or printing, we have to take out the formating. If you use spaces or tab button, it takes a lot of effort to remove all that space. If you use the method listed above, we can Select All, Format Paragraph and change the Special to None and get rid of them all in seconds.

Cool beans.  Thanks for the info!

[Woody]

There is a lot of unknown stuff about using formatting in MS Word. Attached to this posting is a document I've found very useful for getting rid of all the spurious hidden mark up that most people never have a problem with until the time comes to subbing that well polished MSS.

I've had a few problems posting the attachment - though it abides by the rules.

What the attachment is is a Zip file that has had the extension renamed to .PDF.

Once downloaded, rename the file type to .Zip and extract the PDF file on formatting using MS Word.

Hope it's as useful as I've found it.

EDIT: See my last post if you'd like to download a very good and short PDF document on MS Word formatting.

[Ed]

Yeah, sorry about that. Zip wasn't listed as an accepted file extension, for some reason. I've changed it to accept zips now

Thanks for the info, Woody.

[Woody]

Cheers for adding the .Zip format Ed. But the problem I was trying to get around was that the original PDF was only 2.1MB - the maximum stated being 7MB. All I got when attempting the uncompressed PDF format was a message stating that I should contact the administrator because of X, Y and Z issues. Very strange. 
Personally I would not allow .Zip format for the reason that .Zip files can be configured to automatically launch whatever is included in them - which means viruses.
The default options for the forum are more secure, barring MS Word macro viruses, but they tend to be few are far between nowadays.
Anyway that's my two peneth.

[Ed]

These servers are weird. They quite often seem to throw up absurd problems. A while back we had trouble when somebody tried to post a story that contained the word 'frames'. The forum would only post part of the story. After many e-mails to support and lots of research, it turned out the hosts had loaded some programme called mod_something into the operating system that worked like a word filter, and that's what it was. I've no idea why it wouldn't accept your pdf  Mind you, I have had pdfs read as being say 7mb and then I try to send them somewhere and they've turned out to be four times the size. Dunno why that was either

I've taken away the .zip extension from the allowed files list, as you suggest. Thanks for the heads up.

BTW, I've increased the size of the attachments file, just in case it was running out of space.

[Woody]

These servers are weird.

Damned right there Ed. I.T. is weird. Everything is meant to be logical, they're bloody computers for god's sake, but do they ever behave that way? Not in my experience and they're meant to make life easier - Yeah!
Anyway, I'll have another go at attaching the original PDF - I prefer for people not to have to muck around with file extensions just because of some weird computer strop and let you know the outcome in due course.

[Woody]

Oh well - still no go, below is the message when I attempt the "real" PDF attachment;

Your attachment couldn't be saved. This might happen because it took too long to upload or the file is bigger than the server will allow.

Please consult your server administrator for more information.

The attachment will have to remain as it is in the previous post; a .Zip file that has been renamed to a .PDF file for the sake of getting it uploaded - bloody weird.  

EDIT: No longer correct. See my post with a URL for the download, somewhere below this one.

[Woody]

And now I can't re-attach it. However there's always a way.

Here's a url to download a very helpful pdf about formatting in MS Word, which also covers the aforementioned paragraph settings as opposed to tabs, etc.

www.writersanonymous.org.uk/DiyBookLayout.pdf

RIGHT!   Seems to be a problem, in my tests with the download; it stalls. But after clicking the refresh button (or pressing F5) the PDF downloads OK. Bloody flip, what a trauma. Must be solar flares or something.