A story manuscript template

Okay here's what I got for last night's work:

<http://larseighner.com/downloads/story_ms_Template.awt>

I'm not sure all of this works if you haven't nudged Normal, as I did.
Everything should be Courier New 12pt, including headers. Times New Roman
14pt is the nearest equivalent for those who insist on a proportional font.
I'd check it again but I'm rebuilding gnome just to be sure I don't have a
problem there -- and that will be days on my machine.

Someone might care to clean it up and put it somewhere. The slug line,
title, and byline are set from "Properties." The slug line title is
disguised in Keywords and the slug line surname is disquised in
Contributor. Creator is the pen name and Title is the title.

The first page header has to be edited for true name and address lines.
This should be fixed if there are fields somewhere from which this data can
be derived.

I consulted but did not use (as it proved unworkable) mss_Template.awt ©2002
Scott Nesbitt (OpenContentLicense). Nesbitt did not get the first page
header in a header and did not seem to know that if you insist on a
proportional font, the correct equivalent to "New Courier 12pt" is "Times
New Roman 14pt" (not 12pt). Nebitt did get some of the top-right header
lines (although not in a header) including a word count line. However he
inserted the actual word count which is not the correct formula. The
correct formula for word count is lines of body text x 12 (assuming a line
that yields approximately 60 characters). This approximate word count is
used for copy fitting, and actual word count will not work for this purpose
because there may be short lines of dialogue. I did not include this
top-right line because I did not know how to do this kind of arithmetic on a
field. I assume this would be something like (Totallines - 11)*12. The 11
is for non-text lines on the first page. I did not include other lines for
the top right because some of the ones Nesbitt included are of dubious value
(e.g. including a copyright line suggests previous publication).

-- 
Lars Eighner
eighner@io.com  lars@larseighner.com
http://www.larseighner.com/index.html
8800 N IH35 APT 1191 AUSTIN TX 78753-5266
-----------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to
abiword-user-request@abisource.com with the word
unsubscribe in the message body.