Next, Apply Slimming Shears
Wed 2011-02-09 14:44:23 (in context)
- 3,195 words (if poetry, lines) long
Finished a draft yesterday. Still don't know quite what this story is, other than bloated; don't really know what its title wants to be, other than "not that." To fix the one, I'm doing a "quick" (ha!) revision pass this afternoon before emailing it to, or reading it to, friends and colleagues. To fix the latter, I plan on throwing this piece on the mercy of said friends and colleagues.
In case anyone's interested, Open Office Writer will open WordPerfect 5.1 documents remarkably well. However, the conversion is not without its flaws. All table structures in my WP51 document get visible borders that then have to be removed...
- Right-click inside table
- Select "Table..."
- Under "Borders" tab, in the Line/Style section, choose "None"
...and all tabs need to be reinserted, which is most easily done using RegEx Find & Replace. Which isn't simple. Open Office Writer's implementation of Regular Expressions is... non-standard. The expression "\n" means "paragraph mark" in the Replace With field, but "newline" in the Search Field. Or something. So apparently the thing to do is search for the first character of each line and prepend a tab:
Search For: ^(.)
Replace With: \t$1
And you should definitely not click "Replace All." This ends in tears. Have patience and perform the replacement one at a time; when it finds a new line that should not begin with a tab, press the "Find" button to skip this instance and move on to the next.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with a novel-length document. Probably refrain from using WP51 for my draft revisions, I guess. Just export RTF from yWriter and open the RTF with Open Office. Which is fine for novels written in yWriter; not so fine for novels written in WP51.
This is one of those "bridges" you only "cross" upon arrival, so I hear.