I've been gone the past few days. Not from the computer, not from home. Just from here. I've been on IM a bit, but that's more a background thing for me. "Mental wallpaper," if you will. There are many people I'll jump at the opportunity to talk to, either because I haven't in a while, or because I have, and want to continue. Can't lose, the way I see it.

I've been gone because I discovered the joy that is thumb-wrestling MS Word into something resembling a desktop publishing program. Basically, DTP is the ultimate expression of function over form, where anyone could place graphics anywhere on the page and wrap text around them, or otherwise flow text, kern letters, adjust line spacing, etc.

In other words, DTP is what changed text-mode editing such as WordStar into what we have today with the various Office suites for Windows, Mac and *nix. Of course, DTP programs put far more control into unbounded placement of graphics and finer formatting controls than word processors, even comparing an old warhorse such as PageMaker 6.0 with today's MS Word.

Which leads to these past few days' activities. I've been trying to make MS Word act like PageMaker, with some success, but at cost of great time and frustration. In addition to Sian, I'm writing another story, TRO.

TRO is a gift to a friend, and I decided to format the document so it looked like a school composition book. Actually, I was browsing templates for some reason I don't remember, saw the composition book template and decided it would work for TRO. Basically, I was imagining some boy writing the story in the back of a boring high school class. I got 60-75% of the way there, and liked how it looked.

Then, I decided to format Sian as a paperback. This took a little more work. MS Word has templates for greeting cards, calendars, brochures, invitations, resumes, even origami. Basically, just about anything you can do with paper and ink, they have a template for, except novels.

I guess I can see that. Each novel has to look mostly unique (sequels and shared-world works being an exception.) Still, I'd love to see a generic one with "cover page for art," "blank page for inside cover," "inner page for teaser quotes," etc. If nothing else, at least a manifest of what pages go into the preface of a novel before the novel itself.

Instead, I just looked at a nearby paperback and replicated it best I could. I had to create my own logo and cover art, but that wasn't too bad. Between OpenOffice Draw and GimpShop, I had fairly high end vector and raster graphics programs. I found a newly-posted piece on DeviantArt and mangled it. No, it's not mine, so it's not kosher. I do have a note out to the creator, but I am not wedded to it.

(If anyone reading wants to let me use their own artwork for Sian, I'll be happy to look it over.)

Oh, and I took liberty of using some of the comments on the various Sian chapters as "review quotes." I was trying to make the mock-up as good as I could. I didn't draw the spine art because MS Word doesn't (at least at my level of Word-fu) support multi-page-format documents. Aside from that, I think I managed to get 80-85% of the way there.

Then, I decided to "shoot the moon." A bit ago, a friend was worried about a few years worth of journal postings. No, not a request (so you all out there who seem to think you're my minders, you can relax.) Just a worry. However, a friend's worry like that is a challenge to me. I took it upon myself to snarf all the journal postings.

At the time, I was able to find a program that could do that and rewrite the links so they would work as expected when clicked on. The whole archive fit on a CD. Actually, only some 5% of a CD, I think. 650MB is vast when we're talking about text, even if it has the bulk of HTML formatting interspersed in it.

That was before. I still had nearly 1400 journal entries and almost as many corresponding comment files sitting around on my hard disk. Sure, my friend had them, and was elated, but...

(Side note: beware of bored geeks)

This time, instead of ganking art off someone else, I use OpenOffice Draw again, this time to do more than just logowork. This time, I drew a spiral comb, like you'd see in a notebook. (I must have a stationery fetish.) I then adjusted the RGB ranges to find a very nice light green (235,255,235 I think) for the 'paper' and created a graphic for the top of a stenographer's pad.

Back in MS Word, I imported that graphic onto a document, did some more massaging, and ended up with some semblance of the rest of the stenographer's notebook, including cover art.

Now, the hard part. I had to write a program to plow through those 2800 files and extract the right chunks of text, label them properly, and create some sort of HTML document that I could then open in MS Word with the styles intact. In a language that didn't have an HTML parser built in, no less.

(If anyone wants to laugh at some bad C# code, send me email.)

That took a while. Surprisingly, the resulting file was only 6MB. Importing it into Word 2007 took a while. Surprisingly, that file was only 2MB (where'd the rest go?) Printing it to PDF ... you know the drill. 20MB, and nearly 7000(!) pages. Well, I have to confess: as it was to simulate a steno pad, I used only 5.5" x 8.5" pages, etc.

Still, there it was. Three years of blog entries and comments, on a steno pad that'd probably be a foot thick. However, because I knew the RGB color code, I could nearly-seamlessly integrate the spiral comb graphic and the paper color. I say nearly seamless because there was this tiny gap where one ended and the other began. In fact, it was right about where the upper margin for a steno pad would be, you know, the faint red line across the top?

In fact, that line covered the gap up perfectly. And, knowing approximately the right color intensity, I created the vertical line down the middle (the purpose of which I never understood) and the lines across for writing guides. Lastly, when I flowed the text through, the font and luck made them line up nearly perfectly. I'd say I got that one between 95-99% of the way there.

My friend simply wept.