eurydicebound | Thoughts upon editing a document, v.1.0

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1. God help me, if you don't learn to use tabs at the beginning of paragraphs, I will hunt you down and kill you. I cannot search and replace that. I have to do it manually for 15 freakin' pages. I'm already pissed because you shorted the damned word count and I have to fill it in. Don't make me even more homicidally insane by ignoring stuff that you could open one of the books and verify as the style for this game since time immemorial.

*seethe*

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I was actually guilty of this for Dragon and Dungeon, but nobody told me until I moved here!

It's probably too late, but if you're using MS Word you can fix this easily. Select all the text in the document. Go to Format->Paragraph, and in that window under the Indentation header change the pull down menu from 'none' to 'first line'. That should change it.

Actually, that doesn't do it. That puts in a paragraph style with an initial indent, which isn't the same as a tab at the beginning of the paragraph when you get to layout. It works for some companies, but not for the one I'm editing at the moment.

It isn't you, btw. :) If it were anyone who would actually read this journal, I wouldn't put this here.

Hmmm... maybe do a find and replace - find the paragraph marks, then replace them with a paragraph mark and a tab?

MS Word drives me insane - I used to have to write tons of Perl scripts that would fix up documents and data files. I'm used to using all sorts of weird pattern matching and industrial strength find and replace stuff.

Anyway, I have to do tons of similar stuff on the Dragon Compendium. It's real fun trying to take text from a PDF and put it into Word. I've spent most of the past two days tabbing paragraphs, italicizing spell names, and so on.

In Word, try this:

Select the text you want to affect. Then go to Find/Replace (shift-command-H).

Find: ^p
Replace ^p^t

This should put a tab at the start of each line in the selected text. If the two styles you want to use are mixed thoroughly, you may have to do a lot of selecting, but it's easier than having to do it a paragraph at a time.

To follow up on Matt's comment, since I'm sure I know what you're editing, do the following S&R for the whole document:

Find: ^p
Replace: ^p^t

then:

Find: ^p^t>
Replace: ^p>

That will add a tab to all paragraphs, then remove that tab from paragraphs that start with a ">" character.

The problem is that there are two styles of type being used, and one does not use indents, while the bulk of the material does. So nothing global will actually fix it. There also aren't really styles being used... though it might be worth setting up some styles in Word in the template so that I can apply them. I just hate creating styles. I'd far rather have an author follow a style guide to begin with.

If the styles are visually differentiated (e.g., the stuff that doesn't use tabs is in italics), then you can do a global replace checking each time; then it's just a mindless yes/no through the text from beginning to end. You'll probabluy miss a few along the way from highway hypnosis, but you'll hopefully catch those when you edit those 'graphs for real.

Spike, who has run into many, many, many writers who either don't read the style guide or who don't read [i]this[/i] company's style guide, and who uses WordPerfect because of its Reveal Codes feature

Good God I love "Reveal Codes" with a fiery, white-hot passion.

I used to edit documents for law offices and the like, written by who-knows-how-many different temps, and Reveal Codes saved my sanity numerous times.

And then the dirty bastards switched to MS Word, and I thought long and hard about becoming an alcoholic. I wound up unemployed instead (no direct correlation), which rendered the original quandary moot.

It's mostly just the icing on the cake, to use a woefully inappropriate metaphor. There's a lot going on that needs fixing in this doc, and it's a level of fixing I don't have the time or inclination to do right now... and yet it kills me that it isn't getting fixed. There isn't time for the at-least-partial rewrite this piece needs. I don't even know what to write for the sections I have to fill in. I'm just generally frustrated, and filled with the desire to let the blood of coutless shitty authors run through my pen... that sort of thing. The tabs are really the least of the issues.

If it's the sort of thing I have talent fixing...I have some time, if you're willing and able.

It isn't you, btw. :) If it were anyone who would actually read this journal, I wouldn't put this here.
After the Jeff Mackintosh incident, you should probably work under the assumption that all of your posts are being read by the people you don't think would actually read them.

Spike

Well, that's why I don't name names or companies or anything else even remotely controversial. Besides, I can't possibly hope for the level of celebrity that Jeff enjoyed. ;)