m. c. de marco

I had to make a slight change to the sffms2rtf beta tonight in order to submit a story in RTF. Apparently a change in PHP5 has made “\f” an escape sequence rather than just the plain RTF characters my program was assuming they were. This caused some excessive spacing and stray characters in the output, which should now be corrected.

Sffms is a LaTeX document class for typesetting fiction manuscripts.

Language Log traces thirty to the telegraph:

Back in 1859, Western Union established some standard numeric codes to be used for common telegraphic conventions (you can see the entire list here.) Telegraphy operators then and now have always sought ways to keep transmissions as brief as possible, since telegraphy is a relatively slow and highly manual mode of operation.

Mark Liberman at Language Log meets thirty for the first time, and restricts it too narrowly to newspapers although the earliest citations don’t mention them:

1895 Funk’s Standard Dict., Thirty..among printers and telegraphers, the last sheet, word, or line of copy or of a despatch; the last; the end.

I’ve been posting in the NaNoWriMo Technology Forum again instead of writing. Here’s today’s dissertation on sffms:

Memoir is a very popular LaTeX class, and I’d certainly agree that, like LyX, it makes the creation of professionally typeset documents easier than basic LaTeX does. But this is in several ways beside the point. The problems that sffms addresses are not the problems that memoir addresses.

Sffms is a class for people who want to (1) write fiction, (2) submit documents in manuscript format to publishers without having to create the layout themselves, and (3) use the power of LaTeX for other purposes—-as a plain-text format that’s easy to put under version control; as a way to produce camera-ready text, as a way to produce indexed PDFs with hyperref; for the typesetting power of numerous other LaTeX classes; to download any Metafont font, type pdflatex, and have a PDF in your chosen font seconds later; or just to take advantage of prior knowledge of LaTeX.

LyX, memoir, and various other tools can all give you #3, if that’s all you want. Sffms exists for the sake of #1 and #2, which are not as simple as they might sound.

LyX is a WYSIWYG front-end for LaTeX, which, as a poster to the NaNoWriMo Technology Forum noticed, doesn’t seem to work with sffms. I replied:

LyX is not going to work with sffms out of the box; in general, LyX does not work with random LaTeX classes out of the box. Someone (presumably me) has to integrate them by writing a LyX layout file, and my previous attempts to integrate with LyX failed because sffms needs more control over the document (especially header info) than LyX was willing to give it.

Last night when I should have been sleeping, I was writing sffms2txt, a LaTeX-to-plain text converter for sffms or other simple LaTeX files—ostensibly so that I can send one of my stories to a market that requires plain text submissions.

The one exciting feature of sffms2txt that sets it above detex and query replace is the choice of pseudo-italics:

I’ve made some improvements to the sffms2rtf converter, including support for named chapters and some other minor fixes.