Using Word to pre-write rants.

[Juana]

Open Office. Free and I never have problems.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Open Office. Free and I never have problems.

I am stuck using the software of my corporate masters.

[Cramulus]

I used to have OpenOffice on a thumbstick for that exact reason.

[Triple Zero]

Try Notepad, IIRC it's just a basic PC text editor.

Notepad is even worse.  I have to go put every paragraph break back in when I cut & paste.

Then you're doing something wrong, with word-wrap switched on, it should be exactly equivalent to the post form on a website.

Maybe that's the difference? In the post form on the PD forum you need two linebreaks for a proper paragraph break (cause you use a blank line for spacing) but in Word it only needs one linebreak because the inter-paragraph spacing is part of the "paragraph style" settings, not the text.

Or do you mean pasting from and to Word documents? Because Word is the wonky one, Notepad is just plain text. The "paragraph style" spacing does not transfer to Notepad, just like font, color, italics will not.

So in short, you probably need two linebreaks between paragraphs.

The content of the clipboard can be in multiple formats. That's how you can copypaste images, files, folders, plain text [just letters and newlines] and formatted text [font, par breaks, italics, etc]. The thing is, Word deals with formatted text and Notepad deals with plain text.

(Since formatted text is almost never internally represented the same way across applications unless they're both Office applications, copypasting plaintext is almost always what you want. Hence, a lot of people copypaste their text chunks with a quick detour "dip" in Notepad, just to strip it of any formattings)



Re: GARBO on Open Office -- wouldnt help even if Rog could install it. OO's only advantage is that it is free. It's got the same amount of wonk that Word has.

Re: Queen_Gogira on Word Wrap -- in Notepad, the "word wrap" setting only affects display, not the actual contents of the file. It doesn't actually insert newlines, it just wraps long lines so they'll fit on the screen without having to display a horizontal scrollbar. You can verify this for yourself by changing the size of the Notepad window.

[Triple Zero]

alternatively, you can use GMail to write your rants in. Just compose a new mail addressed to self, GMail auto-saves your mail in the Drafts folder.

[Cain]

Select "no spacing" when starting a new document in Word.

Still, Word 2007 onwards is fucking annoying.  Word 2003 was perfect, why did they have to mess with it?  SHINY NEW PRODUCT BUY BUY BUY of course, but still...

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Re: Queen_Gogira on Word Wrap -- in Notepad, the "word wrap" setting only affects display, not the actual contents of the file. It doesn't actually insert newlines, it just wraps long lines so they'll fit on the screen without having to display a horizontal scrollbar. You can verify this for yourself by changing the size of the Notepad window.

I know what it's supposed to do, but it has legitimately thrown in line breaks where line breaks don't go on occasion for me. I'm fairly certain this is not a common thing.

[Golden Applesauce]

WRT Microsoft Word -
There's options to turn all that annoying paragraphy stuff off; most are in Paragraph settings.  Space before & after paragraphs is probably causing you the most trouble.  Getting your settings to override default on new documents is a little trickier, but can be done.

Re: Queen_Gogira on Word Wrap -- in Notepad, the "word wrap" setting only affects display, not the actual contents of the file. It doesn't actually insert newlines, it just wraps long lines so they'll fit on the screen without having to display a horizontal scrollbar. You can verify this for yourself by changing the size of the Notepad window.

I swear that if you save the file while it's word wrapped it comes back with newlines in it.







Anyway, all of that's irrelevant because you should be using NOTEPAD++ (on windows anyway.)

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I loathe the new version of Word.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I loathe the new version of Word.

Words cannot describe how much I hate Office 2007.

[Triple Zero]

Re: Queen_Gogira on Word Wrap -- in Notepad, the "word wrap" setting only affects display, not the actual contents of the file. It doesn't actually insert newlines, it just wraps long lines so they'll fit on the screen without having to display a horizontal scrollbar. You can verify this for yourself by changing the size of the Notepad window.

I swear that if you save the file while it's word wrapped it comes back with newlines in it.

Anyway, all of that's irrelevant because you should be using NOTEPAD++ (on windows anyway.)

ok i might be wrong about the newlines thing. seems very odd though, because I never noticed it myself. But then, it's been ages since I used Notepad for things with longer lines.

About Notepad++, it's nice, I personally prefer jEdit or PSPad for Windows editors. I wouldn't recommend it for Roger though, because I don't really see the advantage if you're not writing code. Well, there might be a few, but it doesn't weigh up against the added complexity of having your menus crammed with 100s of options that you'll never use.

For text writing, the distraction free editors might be a good choice. They're full screen with just the text and optionally a word/line/char counter in the bottom. Bunch of extra features to aid text writing, but the main point is not to have anything else on the screen but the text so a writer can focus on that and only that:

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