OpenOffice Formatting

[Mizzkitten]

I am using Open Office and I am rather confused on how to format my MS in order to submit it. Any help would be very appreciated. Thank you!

[crit32513]

Wow, no response. Okay, maybe someone will still get some use out of this.

I just submitted using Libre Office(same people, very similar program: actually recommend it over Open Office now).

It seems to have some issues reformatting lines. Basically prepare your manuscript: with the Header/Courier 12pt font, lines up to 70 characters(which on courier is like a standard margin width in most word processors). Make sure you've formatted your paragraphs appropriately either with 5 spaces, or with lines between each paragraph.

Then save as .txt, you can try choosing encoding if the option is available, but in my experience none of the Libre Office doesn't seem to save paragraph indents properly. There's no helping it.

Proof-read the .txt file in notepad to make sure there's no funny characters.

Feel free to check the result here: http://www.critters.org/c/mscheck.ht

Despite getting format messages about short lines, when I got to see the 'estimated' final product after submitting, it actually looked properly done.

[Mizzkitten]

Thank you for the response. I will try doing as you suggest.

[crit33524]

If you're running OpenOffice or LibreOffice on Linux, save the document as a text file (after saving it in a decent format) and then run this batch script on the text file:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
# convert single line breaks to double,
# concurrently change em dashes to en dashes,
# then format it to 67 chars with word wrap
sed -e '/^$/d;G' -e 's/–/-/g' "$1" | fmt -w 67 > "$1.fixed.txt"

It runs very fast and with no user feedback. Whatever the name of your input text file is, it'll create a new file with the same name plus ".fixed.txt".