As you can see, today's post is a little unusual; I want to gripe--or rant--about editing / word-processing software with which I have to work, to create the disasters (or miracles) that my stories are. The software I use is MSWord, which is perfectly fine, if I were printing out the stories. But I'm converting them into ebooks, which Word does not directly support (as far as I know), and in any case, ebooks do not usually support everything that a typical author wants to use. The e-readers I use do not even support an embedded font, which is frustrating. My phone shows some of the stories in a font that I like, but my tablet does not--sometimes--and other times, it's the other way round. I do not have the patience to investigate what the software companies--both Microsoft, and the e-reader manufacturers--imagine authors and writers want or need. I'm going to tell them, right here.
What A Basic E-book Word-Processor Should Provide
Fonts: There should be a minimum of 2: Firstly a serif font, such as Cambria, or Garamond, or Droid Serif, or Palatino, which are the fonts I principally use. If they want to, they could give the user a once-and-for-all-times choice, at least for each document, for which font is going to be their serif font. Secondly, they should also supply a fixed-width, or a sans-serif font. They are not the same, but they do provide an alternate regular font face, if one is needed, e.g. for displaying a letter.
Font Effects: By these I mean such (essential) things as Italics, bold, subscript, superscript. Less important (not quite as essential) are strikeout, underline, and colors. I could use a gray of a medium level.
Line and Paragraph Spacing: There are two main ways to indicate paragraph separation: by indenting, and by extra paragraph spacing. I like to do the latter; this post, for instance, has paragraphs indicated by a little vertical space. I think both options should be provided, but I don't think it makes sense to give the writer control over how much spacing, or how much indentation is provided. Every additional thing the software sets out to provide is (A) one more thing that could go wrong, and which the writer could inadvertently use to get into trouble, and (B) one more reason the software will become larger, and more unwieldy, and slower.
Special Characters: I would like an m-dash, a cedilla (for spelling words such as façade, or soupçon). If the software provided the option for ligatures, such as ffl which would be used in words such as shuffle, that would be a plus, but I can see where most authors would look at such a thing cross-eyed, and feel that it is unnecessary. There are a whole set of those, all of which I would like, and most other authors would never miss. Also ñ, which comes in useful in words such as mañana and señorita. The tilde is readily available, but not to attach it to an 'n' easily.
Hyphenation: this is really a function of the e-reader; it ought to split words on the fly, so that when the text is not justified (i.e., when spaces are not expanded to make the right margin even), the presence of extra-long words doesn't make the right margin look totally stupid and ragged. Slight raggedness is, of course, inevitable in un-justified text. In justified text, the presence of un-split long words results in entire rivers of white flowing down the text body, which is almost worse than ragged right margins. So writers of editing software (or word-processing software, whichever is the current term preferred by you folks): disregard the issue of hyphenation.
That's enough for the moment, but I can see myself adding to this list after I have had a little think, as she said in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Kay
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