Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
If you are the person that works with those manuscripts, to bring them to the public, after you're done, good for you. Doesn't matter. But for those of us that have to work on these types of files, yes, it makes it far more work. I don't give two s**ts about conformity for the sake of it. And popularity? Who said anything about that?
|
Are you saying that people send their manuscripts in with varying formats? I'm sorry, I missed that. That's makes a big difference. I should have said that I start with a text editor, but if I sent a manuscript to a publisher, it would be in Word format (via LibreOffice, which I also hardly ever use). I guess I stepped into this discussion a little late.
One of my issues with Word is that, when I worked at a print shop, and we often had to flow a Word document into a Desktop Publishing application (like Ventura Publisher or Page Maker), and there always seemed to be some kind of hidden formatting that was nearly impossible to remove. But this was back around 2005, so I guess a lot has changed since then.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
(I wrote a big long reply to this and then realized that there was no polite way for me to discuss what I see daily, over the last decade and the >8,000 manuscripts we've received and reviewed, so I'm going to drop it.)
|
Sorry for putting you in that position. I should have made it clear I was talking about the creative (first draft) part of writing. I didn't realize people sent manuscripts in... in
whatever format they liked. Even though I like to experiment with different processes when writing screenplays (unsuccessfully) I realize that, when I'm done, the final script has to be in standard screenplay format. I just assumed everyone realized that with anything they sent in.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
(BTW, I too, in the 80's and early 90's, loathed Word. Oh, it was so terrible! it was clumsy crap! It didn't do this and it didn't do that, and it couldn't compare to Wordstar and Wordperfect and all that. It got everything "wrong" and yadda. Oh, silly girl. I struggled along with it for several years, as I had clients that insisted on using it, lecturing them all the while about how this other product or WP was better, etc. And then, one day, I had this massive project--crafting some materials for a half-billion-dollar project I was managing--and I did something SHOCKING!!! I actually took a short tutorial in it. Took me a whopping 3 hours to realize that Word had all these fantastic functions--if you bothered to learn how to use it. Functions that made pretty much EVERYTHING better. Styles, headings, outline mode, the Document Map...man. THAT was eye-opening and what really sucked was the mea culpa. Realizing that I could reorganize a 150K-word file, with thousands of paragraphs and headings with a click? Yowza. Not having to manually redo all that, b/c Word did it easily? Lovely. Yup and all my preconceived notions about it were completely and totally wrong--by refusing to bother to actually learn it, for 3 years, I simply reinforced my incorrect beliefs. I'm sure that this doesn't apply to you, rcentros, but for any other people reading this, that may have done what I did; tried Word and never bothered to learn it--if this is you, Gentle Reader, you may want to try learning it. Makes a world of difference.)
|
I guess, as mentioned above, I come from a world where the Word document was intermediate and — from my experience — Word did not "play well" with other applications. My main (personal) issue with it is that it wanted to think for me. Maybe there was a way to shut all that control-freak crap off but I didn't care enough to find out. I just know that reformatting a document was a royal pain in the... rear. I used Word only when I had to do so at work and even there (if I was allowed) I would install some other application for what little word processing I did at work. (Lotus Word Pro was my favorite Windows word processor, it seemed small, simple and clean.)
At this point I have absolutely no need (or desire) to learn Word. My wife has Microsoft Office Pro (
whatever version came out about 2014 or so) but she mostly uses it for Power Point presentations. She still does most of her writing in WordPerfect or (more and more) Google Docs (I don't like Google Docs either, but I sometimes edit her stuff using it and it's convenient for collaboration).
At any rate... that's the way I see it. If I was sending something to you and you needed Word format, I would send it in Word format (though it wouldn't be via Word).