Re: Further to K-mac's problem...

["William H. TeBrake" tebrake@xxxxxxxx]

Carlo Caballero wrote:
>
> This is neither here nor there, but won't your publishers accept an ASCII
> (er, all-text, no XY commands) file with no formatting whatsoever? They
> actually want a file in Word? I've never had a publisher request a
> formatted document... Usually ASCII makes everyone happy.

My experience has been the same as Carlo's. Unformatted text still is
preferred. There is no reason in the world to send your files in Word
format or any other bloated form. By your own admission, K-Mac, your
text is barely formatted: just a running header, as I recall. First,
strip out the running header and any other XY coding at the beginning of
your files. Then add a small section at the beginning in the form of a
note to the typesetter as follows: "≪MD+IT≫ begins italics; ≪MD-IT≫
ends italics..." The publisher then simply opens the file as plain
text. No conversion is necessary! All of my writing over the last ten
years has been in XyWrite/Nota Bene files, and even though many editors
have requested files in Word or Word Perfect this or that, I have never
complied. My most recent book did require a bit more fiddling than I
described above (hundreds of footnotes which I stripped out into a
separate file and hard-numbered using a utility developed by a NotaBene
XPLer) but that, too, proved to be no problem to the editor or
publisher. If your recipient's word processor cannot read a plain text
file, tell your recipient to get a real word processor. Don't give in
to the ba****ds.
Cheers,
Bill
--
William H. TeBrake
Department of History    E-MAIL: tebrake@xxxxxxxx
University of Maine     TELEPHONE: (Int+1) 207-581-1908
Orono, Maine 04469-5774 USA    FAX: (Int+1) 207-581-1817