Hi, Again the industry standard is .doc (Word 2000). Evil or not, limited or not, that is what your file should ultimately be when you upload. It will give you less problems. You have absolutely no idea how many threads I've read about how Amazon, Apple, etc etc have somehow mangled their book's formatting and they need help, and yet the first thing off the worried writer's keyboard is that he used programme x,y,z - not Word 2000. Personally I would not even use .docx. Yes times may be advancing and it may be becoming more accepted, but why move away to new when you have what mostly works. Cheers, Greg.
All software is evil, but better the devil you know. I've used Word since 1994 when I first switched to a PC. I've tried to use other word processors, but always come back. It's the simplicity that beckons me.
I keep gawping at people calling Word "simple". I find Word to be a tangled cluttered mess of excess functionality and bad interface design. I write in plain text, and convert to something formatted as the second to last editing step. (How do I handle italics, you may ask? Like *this*, and then I sweep through and change them to real italics in that second to last editing step. How do I handle other formatting? I use it so seldom that I don't have a general rule.) I am looking at Scrivener, but I think of it mostly as a way to organize my chunks of plain text.
Word has the bells and whistles, but I don't find it hard to ignore them. I just turn it on, get a blank screen, and start typing. No more complicated than typing here, I wouldn't say... I don't know what half of those little symbols along the top of the box here do, but that's fine - I just ignore them!
This, in a nutshell, is a big part of what I don't like about Microsoft products in general. All you want is a phillips head screwdriver, but Microsoft won't sell you that. You have to buy the whole freakin' Home Depot, and no, you don't get to pick the quality of the individual items in the store you were forced to buy.
Yep; I suspect that much of my issue with Word is my programming background. The features that I do demand in an editor--good flexible search and replace, for example--don't work at all well in Word. So even though I don't actually need them often, their absence annoys me intensely. Another part of my issue is my age and all the years when most things--email, Usenet posts, etc., etc.--used unformatted text. The presence of invisible formatting annoys me. So I do much of my writing in bbEdit, which is often used as a programming text editor and does have the good search and replace and other text, rather than formatting, tools. And even when I write in something else, I often pass it through bbEdit to ensure that absolutely all formatting is stripped away.
