new submission

[sir lancelot]

pretty new at this just wondered if anybody thats been around a while could comment on my submission {The Forest} . I enjoyed writing it but wonder what changes would help. It seemed to get my wife going but then she digs me anyway <l o l>. So feel free to tear me up. I have read alot of poems and storys on the site and dont want to submit crap.

 

[cantdog]

Not currently editing a story, so I'm relatively free.

cantdog @ gwi . net (remove spaces)

or a PM will fetch my attention. But please realize I own a copy of Word which is too old to read yours (trust me on this). So if you send a Word file, we're screwed before we start.

paste it in the body of the message, HTML or plain, or send *.txt or *.rtf or even *.pdf if you insist, I suppose. I use WordPerfect 6.1, but of course no one else does, or I have WordStar 1.1 (for DOS version 1), WordPerfect 5.1, the version of WordPad that comes in Windows 98, NotePad, Write for Windows 3.11, and probably other stuff too, if I look. Your call.

 

[hiddenself]

I use WordPerfect 6.1, but of course no one else does, or I have WordStar 1.1 (for DOS version 1), WordPerfect 5.1, the version of WordPad that comes in Windows 98, NotePad, Write for Windows 3.11, and probably other stuff too, if I look. Your call.

WordStar?!
What the f**k?!
Man, you gotta get with the times.

 

[snooper]

WordStar?!
What the f**k?!
Man, you gotta get with the times.

Wordstar was one of the best products I ever used.

Originally posted by cantdog
... But please realize I own a copy of Word which is too old to read yours ...

All they need do is look in the pulldown list in Word for "save as type" and there are various versions including, if memory serves me, Word 2, Word 6.0/95 and various flavours of WordPerfect, so I expect you can communicate OK.

 

[cantdog]

save as type

Wordstar was one of the best products I ever used.

All they need do is look in the pulldown list in Word for "save as type" and there are various versions including, if memory serves me, Word 2, Word 6.0/95 and various flavours of WordPerfect, so I expect you can communicate OK.

I certainly hope so. I've given this spiel to people before, hitting it hard like this so they'd get the idea that you have to think about it, and gotten *.doc files which had to be put into a plain text editor to even be guessed at.

There I spend time stripping away all the extraneous coding and endless repetitions of font names to find the text, ultimately, buried deeply inside.

The formatting's gone, of course. One editor did their edit in redline mode on Word. I could not derive any notion of what she had done. Waste of time and talent; she's a good author, might even have had something to tell me.

I got Word, you got Word, but my Word refuses to read your *.doc just the same, and it sneers at it because it's a conversion file.

My Word, which is in a copy of Office Ninety-something along with the rest of the stuff in there, and only on the machine at work at that, turns up its nose at everybody else's *.doc files.
"I don't do conversion files," it tells me.

Conversion isn't simple. The headers and so forth need to be swapped out for other sorts of headers, and the body of the file is a stream of printer instructions specific to the printer installed on whoever's machine. This has to be parsed into equivalent printer instructions for whatever printer I have on mine.

Plus font issues!

No, people ought to stick to *.txt, *.rtf, or something else, like pasted html text in the message body, that everyone can read the things with a minimum of chances for fuckup. Microsoft can't seem to convert between its own versions.

 

[cantdog]

wordstar 1

On a five-and-a-quarter floppy!

Wow. What an elegant, functional program that was. You had to know a little about what it was doing, strip out old backup files from time to time, and all, but in those days the average user knew more about what the word processing program was doing. Hell, you could see it do most of it. If it did a backup, you waited for it to get done. If it spell checked, you actually saw the dictionary words scroll by being compared to each word!

There were no subdirectories! Everything happened in the root. Data disks! I never imagined it would be a nostalgia thing at the time; but the pain and hassle was so worthwhile not to have to use white-out ever again.

cantdog

 

[snooper]

Re: wordstar 1

... not to have to use white-out ever again.

But how do you hide your mistakes if you don't paint them out on the screen with whiteout?