I'm trying to enter a national writing contest, and the formatting on my entries keeps getting bollixed up! I get everything exactly as required by the rules, including saving my submissions as Rich Text Files, but when I open them again to make sure they look good, my headers are all mixed up and my lines go over the prescribed ten-page limit! I don't know how many times I've redone those documents this week . . . I even posted a plea for help on the sponsoring group's Facebook page and one of the contest admins offered to look at my files for me. Tonight she sent me back RTFs of my potential entries, telling me my headers were completely missing on what she got, but that's not a problem; I'd be ok once I removed the lines that were putting me over the page limit. But when I opened them, neither of them were over onto Page 11 at all! So what is it I'm supposed to delete??? Grrrrrr, I've literally been at this for days. This may be one time when my beloved WordPerfect is messing me up. A friend is bringing me her laptop tomorrow; it's got (boo, hiss!) MS Word on it, and I think I'll just start over and redo it on there. It's my only hope of getting my entries in before the deadline Sunday night and not wasting my entry fees. I just have to hope that if it looks good in MS Word on my end, it will still look good on theirs. Assuming the judges are all using MS Word.
Are you opening them in RTE? Because if really want to correct the file problems going back to the source editor is really the only way to do it.
Please translate. What is an RTE and what is a source editor in this context? Are you asking me if I'm reopening the Rich Text File in WordPerfect? Yes, because that's the word processing program I have installed on my computer. If I let it open in WordPad I have no page breaks and a tiny top margin.
RTF isn't entirely standardized and can vary from program to program. Using your friend's MS Word will hopefully solve the problem. WordPerfect isn't so widely used anymore. I've found that RTFs from LibreOffice tend to open correctly in MSWord.
From the Facebook page, I gather I'm not the only would-be contest entrant who's having trouble with their RTFs varying. The admin I'm dealing with writes there that she's going to suggest at the board meeting next month that they change the length limit to word count instead of page count. That would help a lot! But thanks for mentioning the LibreOffice option. My friend has dropped her lappy by, so I should be ok getting my files into MS Word. But for the future, this is good to know.
RTE is Rich Text Editor, if you're running windows you have it on your machine, but it's an anachronism. Oh, wait! You don't actually. It must have not been included in the new windows. I was used to seeing it in XP. And holy crap is it a mess to try and get now. I'll link you to a bunch of free RTF editors, but this file format is more antiquated than a pawn shop dealer in the 16th century. The best advice I can give you is find another editor, Libre or Open Office, or even (dredded) MS Word. Word Perfect is clearly not doing it's fucking job on this one.
Not sure I can get the dredded MS Weird to work, either. I'm in the bloody program and every time I put the page number where it's supposed to be, the required left-justified header disappears. Gawwwwww. Maybe I'll just go eat chocolate.
Okay, if you're still having problems there might be some meta data fucking the whole thing up. Copy all of the text and paste it into notepad. Then copy all of the text out of notepad and paste it into word. Fix your headers there, and save it as an .rtf.
Went online and found out how to make my page numbers play nice with the header. (As @GingerCoffee likes to say, "Google is your friend.") The trick of it sure wasn't apparent in the Word program itself, that's for sure. It looks like I've gotten rid of the excess lines. Hopefully that will do it and there will be no more shape-shifting with these documents. Thanks for your suggestions.
