I chose plain text.
Partially, I suppose, because I dislike change. ASCII text was good enough for my grand-pappy, gosh darn it, and it's good enough for me!
I've got a routine for stories I want to keep: Save from archive. Open from Word. Run a macro that takes out the hard line breaks. Do a Ctrl-A to select all and change the fonts. Tidy up the header information, then save as a .doc file. If it's a favorite and I'm feeling like it, I'll insert bookmarks in my file, so I can skip straight to the good bits
but that's optional.
HTML would look prettier (well, depending on color scheme
) but the good thing about plain text is that it can be read by pretty much any browser, device, or word processing program ever made. HTML, otoh, might not be accessible to everybody (or take way too long to download). Still, it's worked for Annette all these years, so it can't be too awful.
PJ
p.s. To take out the hard line breaks while preserving the paragraphs:
Find all double hard returns (Ctrl F, ^p^p) and replace them with a character string that's not anywhere in the text -- I usually use ####. So that takes out the double hard returns (paragraph breaks) but lets you find them again later.
Then, find all the remaining hard returns, and replace them with a space (or possibly nothing, depending on how the file's been set up). That takes out the line breaks.
Last, search for your nonsense string (like ####) and replace it with one hard return. That breaks up the paragraphs again quite neatly. And since I've got it as a macro, it takes only a minute to do.
