Two Spaces or One? No Tabs. Where Did Tabs Go?

I've decided to blog more. (NO!)
Yes, really.

I like e-publishing. This is a neat experience, and I'm glad to be on the show.

e-publishing has some interesting formatting differences compared to print pubs.

Two Spaces or One?

The e-publishers want one space between sentences, the print publishers want two. Hm ... How did that happen?

I'm typewriter-trained, which means I use two. I prefer the look of it, but that's just probably due to familiarity to it. I think the extra space brings a bit more clarity, which is never a bad thing.

All my manuscripts are 2-spaced, and instead of converting, I think I'll stay with two. After all, if you have an MS with two spaces, you can always hit Find and Replace, and replace every two spaces with one, job done in seconds. If it's the other way around, you can't replace one space with two. It'll put two spaces between every single word. If you have to look for the end of every sentence in 800 pages to insert an extra space, you might as well spend days in Hell.

I sure am glad I realized that before I quickly converted my stories to one space for submission to the e-pubs, then had to go back and spent a week EACH (14 books) putting them back for the print pubs. Maintaining two different files, one 2-spaced and one 1-spaced, opens the doors for mistakes.

Tabs. Are they no longer cool?

I like tabs. Never had a problem with tabs, always got along with them, once permanently set. Word is a monster with tabs, I've noticed, and I wonder how much that pain in the rump influenced the elimination of tabs. Damn you, Microsoft!

(Of course, if you know me,
you know I blame Microsoft for the following:
global warming, the dryness of my July 4th brownies (even though the box said "moist"), the Mid-East crisis, the high number of calories in peanut butter, the fact that shoes are uncomfortable. There is no Waffle House near my home and therefore, no good hash browns around. The overrating of Tom Cruise. The overwhelming fear that one day we'll have a President Cheney. The purse I most love is not big enough. Alien abductions. AND the inflated price of peach-yogurt shakes.)

I love you, WordPerfect, but the industry is forcing me to Word. I had wanted to be true to you and had hoped the world would come around to your superiority, but the enemy was too strong, too rich, and too dirty. You were good, really good, baby, but I'm going to have to sacrifice my finer tastes for my career. I'll always love you.

So, tabs are out and I'm down with that, not a crisis. Just an observation. Thank the stars for this computer world where changing such things does not take weeks and months.

If I'd ever had to actually hand-write a manuscript, I'd've never written my name!