Thanks to All, for Good Advice

[Chuck Hastings <cwh2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Free Framers,

I owe the Free Framers list, and the particular
folks who came through for me, a big ThankYou
for responding to my request for help.  I've sent
ThankYous directly already to some of them.

It's marvelous how FrameMaker users all come
to each other's aid, via the Free Framers list.

My problem was to convert a novel, written as
35 text files using PCWrite on a DOS machine,
into one big happy FrameMaker file.  PCWrite
is still in many ways a wonderful fast authoring
tool for creative writing, which efficiently
connects brain to fingertips and screen.  But,
on my old DOS computer, file sizes top out at
about 55Kbytes, or at about 9K words — which
is, actually, as big as a novel chapter ought to be
anyway.  This fault isn't in PCWrite, but in the
computer's 640Kbyte working-RAM-size limitation.

So, each chapter is a separate text file.  My
publisher requires a book to be submitted as
one big unified file, in MSWord or WordPerfect
or RTF.

My successful recipe made use of suggestions
from many of you, plus my own muddling
through.  I'll record what I did here, in case
anyone else ever has to carry out a similar task:


Step 1.  Attach all the chapter text files to an
             email message, and send it to myself
             using Netscape Messenger.  The files
             needed to be selected in reverse order.
             They came out as an email message
             with all chapters within the body of the
             message  (which by now totalled about
             a megabyte).  That may sound kludgy,
             but it's fast and it works.  My ISP is
             EarthLink, so I only very rarely have
             any reliability issues with the Internet.

Step 2.  Copy-and-paste from the received email
             message into a blank FrameMaker file.

Step 3.  Eliminate the extra Returns which PCWrite
            puts at the end of every line.  PCWrite has
            a simple command to its print routine to
            automatically doublespace, from singlespaced
            text.  Thus I hadn't needed, nor used, any extra
            lines in between paragraphs;  but a Return
            followed by five spaces  (my standard new-
            paragraph identation)  was a reliable end-of-
            paragraph marker.  I globally substituted
            @@@ for those, using \p in the dialogue
            box as several of you suggested as the stand-in
            for Return.  Then I replaced all of the surviving
            Returns with a nothing.  Then I replaced all
            @@@ sequences with Returns.

            Note:  I'm still using 5.5.6, although I have a
            copy of 7.0 which I haven't installed yet.
            They differ substantially in the dialogue-box
            choices for stand-in codes.

Step 4.  Changing straight quotes to smart quotes.
            This was the only nonobvious  (at least to
             me)  step in cleaning up the FrameMaker
             file which I'd produced for the complete
             novel.  Straight-quote " characters are usable
             as is in the dialogue box:  \` and \' respectively
             are the dialogue-box stand-in codes for smart
             opening quotes and smart closing quotes.
             A space followed by a " reliably finds an
             opening " quote;  and a " followed by
             a space, a closing " quote.  I have lots of
             verbal dialogue in my fiction, and it took
             several minutes on a 450MHz computer
             for FrameMaker to make these substitutions,
             running full blast on  `Change All In:'.  But
             that method sure did beat doing the entire
             job by hand!

Step 5.   (Not done yet;  I'll do it the very last thing,
             after another reading/editing pass through
             the novel using FrameMaker.)  Copy-and-
             paste the text from FrameMaker into
             MSWord, and email the MSWord file to
             the publisher.

            Note:  I'm doing what I can to lobby this
            publisher, Xlibris Corporation of Philadelphia,
            to start allowing FrameMaker files as one
            more acceptable input format.


Chuck Hastings      cwh2@earthlink.net



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