Hatrack River Writers Workshop: email text format

This is topic email text format in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by MrWhipple (Member # 1436) on :

Some people in my critique group asked me to put up some formatting info for converting a MS Word or other document to a to a format that looks good in most email programs and news readers.

First the concepts. What these programs want is a plain ASCII text file. ASCII text is just text, no formatting like italics or bolding or font changes. It is just eight bits per letter, plain and simple. This is the lowest common denominator of the computer text world. Word processors fill up the text with a bunch of control characters and other non-ASCII bytes. The object of this exercise is to change formatted text into plain ASCII format. In the process we will have go give up italics, bolding, fonts, etc.

I will assume that you are using MS Word but this, or some slight variation, should work for other word processors.

First you have to get rid of font problems. Mark all your text, ctrl A in Word, then change the font to a MONOSPACED font like Courier. This makes each letter take up the same amount of space on the line.

Then do a File, Save As, and pick Text Only .txt instead of .doc in the bottom dialogue. It will warn you that you will loose all your formatting, but that is what we want.

Next open this file that we just did a Save As and cut and paste it into your email or newsreader program.

I hope that this works for you, if not let me know. There was a better explanation on the web that I used to get to through critters.org but the link is now dead. If anyone knows a good link that explains this process better please post.

Posted by Chronicles_of_Empire (Member # 1431) on :

Another way would be to simply copy/paste everything from Word [or similar] and simply paste into Notepad - then save.

Shortcuts to use:

CTRL+A - highlight all text
CTRL+C - copy all highlighted text
CTRL+V - paste

Also note -

CTRL+X - cut all highlighted
CTRL+Z - undo last action
CTRL+Y - undo the undo!

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

You don't even have to save, as long as you deselect the text and then reselect it in the Notepad window (that is, when the text first is inserted into the window, it is highlighted--so you click somewhere in the window, and the text is deselected--which is shown by the fact that it reverts to normal--and then you reselect the entire text--so that it becomes highlighted again--and copy and paste that).