Science Fiction Writers Workshop

Micro$haft Word replaces a lot of characters with other characters to make the document look prettier. For example, it replaces double and single quotes with "smart quotes" that curve in or out. It also replaces the three individual periods in ellipsis (...) with an ellipsis character, and the two hyphens in a dash (--) with a dash character. It does other stuff too, which are mostly annoying.

These special characters don't translate to plain ASCII text, which is what we use to send stories around. The stories have garbage characters wherever those special characters were supposed to be.

Note you can disable all these character substitutions, but you probably don't want to. They do enhance the appearance of your document when you print it out. It's only for critting we need to get rid of them.

Instead, here are instructions on how to save your document as plain ASCII text, and get Word to replace these characters with the normal ASCII ones.

This is for Word for Windoze. For Word on Macs, the steps should be similar -- anyone want to reply to this note with details?

First, go to File, Save As. A dialog box will pop up. Go to the bottom of it, where it says "Save As Type:", and choose "Plain Text (*.txt)". Rename it, or just save it with the same filename and the new extension. For example, instead of "yourstory.doc" you have "yourstory.txt". Click the "Save" button.

Another dialog box will pop up, titled "File Conversion". The following selections should be done already, but check them just in case: "Text Encoding" is "Windows (default)", "Insert Line Breaks" is unchecked, "End lines with:" is "CR/LF".

In addition, check "Allow character substitution". This causes Word to replace the special characters (like smartquotes and ellipsis) with the "normal" ASCII ones.

You can then look over your new format in the Preview at the bottom of this dialog box to make sure everything looks good. Then click "Ok" to save in your new format. Note, your original document in Word .doc format is unchanged.

Now, find your new file (yourstory.txt) and double click on it to open it in Notepad. (You can open it in any TEXT editor, NOT Word or it will convert the special characters again.)

Make sure word wrap is turned off. In Notepad, go to Format menu and make sure Word Wrap has no check mark beside it. If it does, select it and the check mark will go away. Note that your story now has each paragraph on one very long line. This is what we want.

Finally, select Edit / Select All and Edit / Copy, or just Control-A Control-C. Then paste the whole shmozzle into your email to Elizabeth.

Tada. Your story should be in simple ASCII text format, no more weird characters.

Note you will have lost any special formatting like italics or bold. There is no ASCII equivalent for this. Can't have everything (unless we want to switch to HTML).