Wow, great to see this progress
A couple of words on formats, etc.
First off, I’m pleasantly surprised that Word’s classic doc-format is supported by more than Open Office. I figured we would need to use RTF instead to make the Archive-upload open to anybody. Of course, there’s always the fallback-to-txt option in case of a non-standard word processor. As for the different versions of Word, when you select the doc-format, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using Word 2003, 2007, or 2010.
Change tracking is a feature I’ve used with all stories I submitted to the archive so far. Don’t know how much this has actually become a defacto standard between GEs and writers, though. I’m sure Labby could make a poll with his GEs
As for the original upload in a non-ASCII-txt format and the subsequent conversion to ASCII-txt. I’m all for doing it this way, but I believe there is one style-issue we should be aware of. Right now, the Archive presents all stories in plain-text ASCII. Well, duh, because that’s what this thread is all about. But there’s the matter of the typographic characters such as slanted quotes, the ellipses character (which is a stylistically/grammatically suspect entity in and of itself), and the n-dash and m-dash which look indistinguishable in plaintext. In a lot of stories, those characters get replaced by standard-ASCII characters, e.g. using two or three regular hyphens instead of an m-dash. Whether it’s the authors doing this or our dedicated GEs, once we switch to uploading the stories in a richer format, I believe we should standardize those conversions.
Michael
