Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Sounds like some people I knew at school; the other thing they did was press enter at the end of each line.
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Oh, yeah. We get that one all the time. The "sit on the spacebar" approach, though...we get that far more rarely. Or the "linefeed" at the end of half the lines, with the pilcrow at the other half.
Somewhat OT:
My personal favorite? The "every paragraph is aligned differently" approach. I don't know what the hell is going on out there, educationally, but we've had a number of manuscripts in which dialogue paragraphs are unindented, and narrative are indented, or vice-versa. No, these aren't the James Joyce's of the future; they're illiterate (literally. I'm not being mean. The books are usually hardly readable). There appears to be someone out there "teaching" aspiring authors that this is the correct way to write.
I had a book come in recently (some of you on the V&R thread will remember me bemoaning it; it was kinda-porn, with a 14-y.o. black female protagonist, written by a man from the girl's FP POV), with this type of half-deranged paragraph formatting, except it wasn't organized this way; paragraphs just started willy-nilly, wherever. It also had a lovely number of typos and grammar errors ("he road me until...")...and when I asked the guy, before I realized what it was and declined it muy pronto, if the paragraph formatting was deliberate, he said (I swear: really, you cannot make this s**t up): "this is how I got it back
from the person I paid to do my editing." (italic emphasis added). I was positively aghast.
When I realized what the book
was, and declined it, I couldn't help myself; I told him that truly, it was the worst-formatted book, with the most typos, grammar, punctuation and spelling errors, we'd ever seen (true). And that he needed to find his so-called "editor" and get every penny back. I mean, EVERY type of horrid mistake, from not closing dialogue tags, to opening new dialogue tags inside unclosed dialogue tags...you name it. Homonym errors, the whole schmear. I can only assume, given the nature of the material, that he lied to me about having any type of editor, because, in US terms, a Fifth-Grader would have caught and corrected most of them. Horrid, horrid stuff all 'round; the content AND the formatting.
Back OT:
So: how does a front-end piece of software fix THAT and produce clean XML?
Hitch