Well, if you ever want to learn more about them, I’m glad to provide insight. They look like nonsense but are extremely highly-structured in how they work.
At some point in my writing endeavors, I considered writing an Eclipse plugin to transform it into a writing tool. Then I discovered Scrivener which works more like a development environment and allows me to structure my writing project from the start. However, when handing over stuff to an editor you still need to give them a word document because Scrivener just doesn’t support editing in the same way the word format does. I think this is the defining feature that makes Word (et al) valuable in the writing world.
But I have sometimes wished for better refactoring tools for writing.
For example, as pointed out, a standard “Find and Replace” will change words wherever they are encountered. You can circumvent this in some ways (searching for “case sensitive” words like “Greg” helps, but as luck would have it the particular sentence in question started with “Gregarious”, so it was still caught), but a lot of that requires a mind designed better than mine.
It works well if you add a space after the word you want to find and replace (e.g. "Greg ")
Was very proud when I thought of that trick to avoid annoying replaces.
Don’t you then have to do another search on “greg,” and another on “greg.” and so on? Everyone to their own methods, but I think I would rather just search for “greg” and check each occurrence to see if I wanted to do the replacement.
You are right, but it doesn’t take a lot of time to do the same thing again with the different punctuations. All together a question of minutes.
Depending on the size of the document looking at every instance manually takes a lot more time though. It is safer of course but not sure you need that
I just checked. It runs, given the “Rosetta” emulator, which runs almost all Intel macOS software on the M1. The native Apple Silicon version is under development.
Thank you. Useful to know.
I have a D&D book with many, many, occurrences of the word “dawizard” and none at all of “damage.”
I think I have seen that book. That sounds really familiar.
This appears to have been Encyclopedia Magica, Volume 1 for AD&D in 1994.
That explains it, I have that book. Definitely noticed the typos when reading it, and it was hilarious!
Next time I play a spellcaster, definitely going to name him Dawizard
I’m tempted to write a post with a similar copy editor mistake, as a sort of howizard.
I actually have this as one of my few remaining artefacts from my 2nd Ed days! It’s from 1994, so excitedly looked up Cube of Frost Resistance only to find, much to my sadness, that I have a corrected version. Boo.
You should get some color in there, too. Cyan or Wizardnta maybe?
Definitely deserves such an howizard.
Actually, I think this is a better name for howitzers in a fantasy world…
Sounds like a nickname someone from our world would make after seeing a wizard cast a bunch of fireballs.
This year I have been adding more volumes by Kipling to our bookshelves, partly because I’ve discovered that a lot of his collections of stories are out of print and don’t seem likely to come back—and ordinary public libraries seem to be increasingly focused on current works rather than older ones. It occurred to me to see what was available on Amazon UK. Today a Penguin Classics collection showed up, titled The Man Who Would Be King after one of Kipling’s most widely known stories. It overlaps with some collections I already have (around eight stories are duplicates), but it has many others I don’t have, including half a dozen I had especially wanted to reread. (There are notes at the back, but from a quick glance it seems as if many of them explain things I already understood; perhaps it’s fortunate that they’re short.)
I do still want copies of a few more stories—“Love-o’-Women,” “The Church That Was at Antioch,” and “The Mother Hive,” to start with. I’ve found a Web that seems to have all of Kipling available for download (I think legally, since apparently anything published before 1926 is in the public domain, which includes the first and third at least). So that’s a possible insurance, though I’d rather have them in print.
I’ve also added Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South to our shelves, which I read a few years ago and quite enjoyed; it’s one of the best treatments of mutual attraction in the guise of conflict since Pride and Prejudice.
So I finished Harrow the Ninth. The story is confusing and intricately woven around the first book. Is it perfect? No. Am I eagerly awaiting the 3rd book in the now quadrilogy? Yes.
What follows is the spoileriest spoilers so please avoid if you haven’t read the book, as I really loved it and think the following would ruin anyone’s enjoyment.
God damn it Roger, you played that one close to your chest. Me:”the narrator sounds a bit like Gideon”, Roger: likes this comment.
Although it maybe a bit obvious as the book develops, and as you ask yourself why use second person narrative. The delivery of the first time the narrative switches to first person is delightful and almost justifies the slog through the earlier chapters.
I feel that as it reaches the end -and particularly the epilogue where they introduce even more mystery- maybe they are juggling one too many balls, I am exceedingly happy to hear that they have added a fourth book to the planned trilogy. I think this will help significantly with pacing particularly as new characters and voices are introduced.
Finally if you start a religion and call your god John (Jon?) and have them lose their biscuit in their tea (almost sounds like something Pratchett would write) then your onto a winner.