Three RTFs. Three file sizes. Identical contents.

K_Woods

9 of 10 Overlords prefer Evil Pie!
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The title pretty much sums it up. I've got one story that I went back to take another look at and see if it needs more polishing. Open it up in WordPad, and I find the "center" aligned text is showing up past the 5" line.

Cue freakout. I was sure it was fine before I was forced to replace my now-dead laptop. I've subbed it to at least one market since. Did it look like this?!

Since nothing I did in WordPad managed to solve that issue, I went and opened it in OpenOffice to see if it was fixed. And it looked normal, it even printed as it looked in the print preview (and the print preview looked different from the WordPad version too) so I went ahead and did my clean-up work there, then saved.

The file was 69KB. Compare to the WordPad file, which was 10.

But wait. It gets better. Next step was poking on the internet to see if there were some issues with RTF support in OpenOffice -- turned out the entire format's broken. But there was mention of a program called AbiWord, and someone mentioning it had proper RTF support. And hey, it's freeware. So download that, install, and copy over and make some tweaks to get the page alignment right again, and save.

62KB. And it looks messed up in WordPad.

I have no idea which is the right one. WordPad supposedly was using 1" margins, but its print preview was different from OO's, which did print properly (now I'm wishing I'd tested the WordPad document). And I'd always thought RTFs were supposed to be small, which OO's and AbiWord's output are both definitely not. One seven-page file in RTF format shouldn't be over 15-20KB maximum, should it? How do I know which one's the right one?
 

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RTF is a strange beast. It was invented by a consortium of developers in the early 1980s.

But then Microsoft decided that they wanted to, well, own everything. So they created their own versions of the RTF markup. Several times. Other word processors followed suit.

RTF is a plain text file with some additional information in a file header (invisible mostly) and that uses formatting codes that are awfully similar to the way the AW forum software uses formatting codes.

The size difference has to do with what other information is stored in the file (For instance MSWord includes a list of all the fonts installed on the computer that made the file), and with how the file-maker saves files to the hard drive; some are exact, some "round up."

Honestly, I would just use WordPad's Save As .rtf format

I would also use the minimum of formatting, in compliance with however the publication requests files be formatted.

Don't use tabs for paragraph indents.

Use a single typeface; Courier or, if the pub says something else, like Times, then whatever they request.
 

K_Woods

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I hadn't noticed the tab thing until I opened a copy of the original RTF in Notepad. I'll definitely see about cleaning that up. (Everything else was already in place.)

Thanks for the quick and lucid reply. Time to retype in WordPad, methinks...
 

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I hadn't noticed the tab thing until I opened a copy of the original RTF in Notepad. I'll definitely see about cleaning that up. (Everything else was already in place.)

Thanks for the quick and lucid reply. Time to retype in WordPad, methinks...

Don't retype. Find a version that has all of the text, no matter how the formatting looks.

Save it in whatever as ASCII text/plain text/.txt using Save As.

Open that in WordPad, fix the formatting, then Save As .rtf.

ASCII text/plain text/.txt is the only thing that is pretty much universal, in terms of computers.

It doesn't have formatting other than paragraph breaks. No fancy characters, not curly quotes, no bold or italics or underline.

But Saving it as ASCII text will purge any weird funky leftover stuff.
 

K_Woods

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Oooh. *facepalm* Why didn't I think of that? (Probably fatigue. At least I hadn't started retyping yet!) Thank you again.