indenting

[neil]

on 28/1/05 4:16 pm, Mark A. Mandel at mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU wrote:

>
> And I get a lot of grief when copying text electronically between
> applications. F'rex, I see a nicely formatted web page or MS Word document,
> with the paragraphs separated by blank lines, and I copy it and paste it
> into a plaintext document (the only universal format, or the closest thing
> there is to one)... and those blank lines disappear, because they're part of
> the formatting, not the text. Grrr.

As a typographer, I work in QuarkXpress on a Mac.

Text, however, arrives in all formats from a variety of programmes.

I normally set text with indented paragraphs (either an indent equivalent to
the text size or to the overall leading).

Full out paras are used in chapter openings and after cross/sub-heads.

I tend to find that Word users who indent use a tab, rather than an indent
style-sheet. This means that when I reformat the text I have to do a
find/replace on all the tabs, then apply a para indent style-sheet. Not too
difficult.

With double-spaced, full-out paras I simply do a find/replace for two para
returns and substitute one para return. Then apply my para indent
style-sheet.

Printed text requires different treatment from that of correspondence or
emails.

neil at typog.co.uk