Quote:
Originally Posted by exaltedwombat
Absolutely! But now and again someone comes up with a neat method that DOES work across a lot of devices and, when it does fail, fails gracefully. I'd love to be able to say "DO do that!" more.
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We drove ourselves nuts, a few years back, formatting a (godawful) screenplay that had been written in FirstDraft. The big issue was that the author had created a table-type format in which not one but two characters would be speaking simultaneously, so you had (essentially) four cells--the character names and then beneath them, the dialogue. I forget all of it now, but he had s**tfits if the dialogue wasn't x characters to the (left or right or whatever) of the character name, etc. If I explained the phenomena of what happened when font sizes were enlarged once, I did it twenty times. To no avail. I have a longish ironic story as to how I lost this client, (he decided I was "too demanding," because I got angry after spending my entire weekend on his "rush" manuscript, when he popped up on Monday with a completely
new manuscript--and this was the initial print layout, mind you).
We've done plays and screenplays since then, but I don't jump through those hoops any longer. Either they understand the limitations upfront, or we don't take the job. I send them to view a book on Amazon that has a sample in it, and that's the format--take it or leave it. Between screenplays/plays and poetry, life is just too short. I'm all for doing whatever possible to give a book that extra "something," but not when we're killing ourselves for less than the price of a cut-and-color in Los Angeles, and the gig resembles something that should have Lalo Schiffrin music and, God help us all, Tom Cruise trying to accomplish it.
Hitch