Email subs -- formating? help needed

Exir said:

I am submitting electronically to a literary magazine. And it requires me to paste the submission into my email. Should I use rich-text mode or plain text? How should I handle indents?

Thanks!

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If the magazine doesn't specify, I'd suggest plain text, with a blank line between paragraphs, and no indents. Indicate underline/italics with either '*' or '_' on either side of the underlined/italicized text. (As in, _This_ is what I mean.)

And, no matter what you decide, make sure you email yourself a copy first. Things have ways of becoming gobbledygook in a sent email.

Exir said:

I am submitting electronically to a literary magazine. And it requires me to paste the submission into my email. Should I use rich-text mode or plain text? How should I handle indents?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Plain text, not attachment.

No double space, but leave a space between paragraphs.

Denote italics as _this text is italicized_.

Denote bold as *this text is bold*.

No other formatting necessary. Keep it simple.

Plain text rules. Test-mailing to yourself doesn't guarantee safe delivery intact, since you will be receiving the e-mail with the same software and settings -- unless you have an alternative computer set up differently. That's where the trouble comes, see -- A__ sends prettily formatted mail using Outhouse Espresso, B__ downloads it with Foxmail or maybe an old Netscape... garblage. Plain text suffers only from line-chopping, which is not hard to repair.

Thing is, you are thinking "rich text" when you format e-mail, but it is not. It is HTML -- webpage code. That's why pasting forum posts from a word processor mucks up. Things don't translate well.

Chopped lines. Ah. Well, it happens when you specify (or leave the default) length of a line of text...it gets cut like this:

They all drew to the fire, Mother in the big chair with Beth at
her feet, Meg and Amy perched on either arm of the chair, and
Jo leaning on the back, where no one would see any sign of
emotion if the letter should happen to be touching. Very few
letters were written in those hard times that were not touching,

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The above excerpt from Little Women has every line broken at around 60 characters. That means that if you paste that into Word, each line will count as a separate paragraph. The lines don't flow and wrap to a window of varying size...

They all drew to the fire, Mother in the big chair with Beth at
her feet, Meg and Amy perched on either arm of the chair, and
Jo leaning on the back, where no one would see any sign of
emotion if the letter should happen to be touching. Very few
letters were written in those hard times that were not touching,​

They all drew to the fire, Mother in the big chair with Beth at
her feet, Meg and Amy perched on either arm of the chair, and
Jo leaning on the back, where no one would see any sign of
emotion if the letter should happen to be touching. Very few
letters were written in those hard times that were not touching,​

They all drew to the fire, Mother in the big chair with Beth at
her feet, Meg and Amy perched on either arm of the chair, and
Jo leaning on the back, where no one would see any sign of
emotion if the letter should happen to be touching. Very few
letters were written in those hard times that were not touching,​

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I can't be certain how you are seeing it because I don't know how big your browser window is, what size anything is on your screen. Anyway, it looks like cr@p from here. The lines can be rejoined, but it has to be pasted into some editor.

It happens in e-mail all the time. I don't know why, it's some holdover from the days of the dinosaurs, when text didn't wrap at all. What you would do to prevent or at least lessen it depends on what you are using for e-mail. What software, not what...ack, I really don't want to get into that.

Exir said:

Ah. I see what it is. I use Gmail - does gmail have this problem, and how do I solve it?

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I just figured out how yesterday, so I'll share: copy and paste the text from your manuscript document into Notepad. This will dump all the formatting. Now copy and paste what's in Notepad into the body of your email. Be sure to replace italics, etc., because those will have been dumped too. I've found that Gmail handles text much more gracefully if you give it the Notepad treatment first.

I remember hearing the notepad treatment suggested by an ezine somewhere--I think it was Anotherrealm. That should work.

Devil Ledbetter said:

I just figured out how yesterday, so I'll share: copy and paste the text from your manuscript document into Notepad.

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See, that would drive me nuts--having to search through the text to manually insert underscores around the underlined text. My approach is to reformat inside the word processor. In Word, the steps would be:

1. Replace ^p with ^p^p (Format: no underline). To get (Format: no underline), click Ctrl-U twice with the cursor in the Replace With box.

2. Replace (Format: underline) text with _^&_. To get (Format: underline), click Ctrl-U once with the cursor in the Find box. That funny combination of _^&_ means replace whatever you found with _whatever you found_

Now copy into Notepad.

Beth Bernobich said:

See, that would drive me nuts--having to search through the text to manually insert underscores around the underlined text. My approach is to reformat inside the word processor. In Word, the steps would be:

1. Replace ^p with ^p^p (Format: no underline). To get (Format: no underline), click Ctrl-U twice with the cursor in the Replace With box.

2. Replace (Format: underline) text with _^&_. To get (Format: underline), click Ctrl-U once with the cursor in the Find box. That funny combination of _^&_ means replace whatever you found with _whatever you found_

Now copy into Notepad.

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I neglected to mention that I alway replace ^p with ^p^p when I'm moving from indented double space to block paragraphs. But I didn't know how to replace underlined text, so thank you.

interesting, notepad loses bold though, and indents, and some email settings allow plain text or they view it as html...would just cut and paste it into outlook express which is used by at least 80% and send.