Wednesday, December 16, 2009

How to turn a newspaper column into trash by reformatting











Today the American Reporter, which is an online newspaper, reran an old humor column by Erik Deckers from the week of October 31, 2003. It is titled Just Imagine Them Naked. You can read a correctly formatted version at his Laughing Stock web site. That version has 18 paragraphs.

The American Reporter rerun today turned his column into trash. They left out all the carriage returns and line feeds that formerly had separated it into easy to read short paragraphs. Now it is just one gigantic paragraph - with almost 740 words. Their combination of small type and no paragraphs made it almost unreadable.

Back in April I discussed the Joy of software: what you see may not be what you get. A web publisher should never do this to a writer!

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