How do you handle formatting? In plain English, please? I'm not that techie-minded, as you can probably tell here. . .argh. Thanks.

If all else fails---and wait for the others to chime in, 'cause I'm computer illiterate, too, and there may yet be an easier solution---just start retyping it in whatever new format you want to use. (I had that problem when I moved from a one-lung word processor to my first full-fledged computer---I retyped a whole novel, but I was also throwing out whole chapters).

When I've put things in .txt, I wind up losing a lot, and wind up having to go over it again to fix---and computer generated typos wind up in there despite my best efforts.

And Mike, I've even got the "Word for Dummies" book, but there's no way to search for extra lines (such as when it decides to put two blank lines between paragraphs every so often for no discernable reason) and I can't figure out how to search for the indents which are erratic in places!! Argh. . . . And the lost underlines will have to be searched for in a chapter-to-chapter comparison and replaced with an underline before and after the section that should be in italics. In SUBMISSION format, these need to be UNDERLINED (not in italics). In .txt (for working with writing software and in submitting to crit groups) you have to put the underlines before and after the words or they don't stick where they're put (.txt format erases them).

I'm a bit thick-headed about techie stuff, so I seem to learn things the hard way. I guess I'm just going through one of those "hard way" lessons.

Oh, and Mike, my Search and Replace function works when it darned well feels like it (I have Windows XP and my Word is 2002 version, I think - it just isn't that "old"). Yesterday, it was certain there was no word "chapter" in my file at all! "Chapter" (upper case "C") or "chapter," it refused to find either one so I could copy and paste the chapters into individual files. So I'm having to scroll and look for them that way. ARGH!!!!!!!!!! I'm so sick of this. I'd rather be writing. Well, I'd rather be doing nearly anything - having my flu shot, even! - than reformatting this stupid thing AGAIN! argh.

Thanks for the ideas.

OK, run the following find & replace in Word:

Find what: [^13^11][ ^s^t^13^11]{1,}
Replace with: ^13
Check the box for "Use wildcards."

That should remove all the blank lines from your document. It may also, as a side effect, deal with some of the indenting problems by removing tabs.

By the way, any novel-writing software that formats paragraphs as blocks with an extra line between them rather than indented is pretty useless, as proper format is indented.

[This message has been edited by EricJamesStone (edited October 04, 2006).]

find: ^p^p
replace with: ^p^t

to go from blocks of text with an extra line between them to indented text with no extra lines btwn paragraphs.

quote:

---

Oh, no, Robert, I'm not retyping it!! I'm editing and polishing it scene-by-scene, chapter by chapter, but retyping the whole thing? NO, that's the typewriter way, not the computer way!

---

I just past the fifty-thousand-word point in my new novel, and am still planning on rewriting-as-described. I think it improves the work when I do. (I figure somewhere between one hundred thousand and one hundred fifty thousand for a final total, depending on what I decide to do.)

That said, I very well may end up printing out my manuscript, penciling the changes, and typing it back in in order to tighten as I go. I don't think it will be that hard.

Once you have finished your writing in WriteItNow, without worrying about formatting (although you can use bold, italic and underline), you output to Word or equivalent and you can tick boxes to choose whether you want to indent paragraphs etc.

If you need to make any further amendments or re-writes to your story, you do it in WriteItNow using the original .wnw file, before outputting once again to your word processor. Outputting as RTF is a one way process and you can't then reload it into WriteItNow.