1. Background. I have been a legal secretary in Baltimore for twenty-seven years, and for the last nine I have also put out The Choir Loft, the monthly newsletter of our church's Chancel Choir. It runs four pages: rehearsal notes, the anthem schedule, birthdays, a word from our director, and whatever else will fit. I type it in Microsoft Word, print it on the church copier, and hand it out at Thursday night rehearsal.

Last spring our director of music, Carolyn Knouse, asked whether we could also put it on the Web, for choir members who have moved away and for our shut-ins, several of whom now have grandchildren with computers. I said yes before I understood what I was agreeing to. Word has a menu choice that says it will make a Web page for you. I chose it. What follows is what I learned, set down in the hope that it saves another editor the evenings it cost me.

2. What "Save as HTML" does.

(a) Word 97, which I use at home, has File, Save as HTML. The result looked fine in Word. It did not look fine in Netscape: my headings came out a different size from the ones I had set, and the space between paragraphs came and went. When I opened the file in Notepad to see why, I found that Word had wrapped a FONT tag around nearly every paragraph, often the same FONT tag it had just closed one line before, and that some of the tags were closed in a different order from the one they were opened in. A browser may forgive that or may not.

(b) Word 2000, which the church office received this summer, has File, Save as Web Page. It does a great deal more. Before it writes one word of the newsletter, it writes a long block of style instructions meant for Word itself, so that Word can open the page again later and make it a Word document. Every paragraph is marked as a Word paragraph style. Every blank line becomes a small construction of its own.

(c) I have put a short stretch of each, side by side with my own version, on a separate sheet: Enclosure: Before and After.

3. File size. Here is the same four-page September issue, saved four ways:

The words are the same in all four. Over a 28.8 modem, which is what most of our older members have, my version comes in about two seconds; the Word 2000 version takes about fourteen, and every bit of the difference is instructions for Word, not for the reader.

4. Why the quotation marks became question marks.

(a) The first issue I put up, my sister in Richmond called to ask why it said our bass soloist was Mr. Grandy?s. On my computer it said Mr. Grandy's. On hers, every apostrophe, every quotation mark and every long dash had turned into a question mark, and on a friend's Macintosh some of them were little empty boxes.

(b) The cause is a Word feature called smart quotes. As you type, Word quietly replaces your plain straight quotation marks with curly ones, and two hyphens with a long dash. Those curly marks and long dashes are special characters that Windows computers keep in one particular place. Not every computer keeps them there, and a computer that can't find them puts up a question mark or a box. The plain straight marks on your keyboard come through the same on every computer I have tried.

(c) To turn smart quotes off in Word 97 or Word 2000: Tools, then AutoCorrect, then the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Under "Replace as you type," uncheck "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes", and uncheck Symbol characters (--) with symbols while you are there. Click OK.

(d) To fix the curly marks already in a document: with smart quotes turned off, choose Edit, Replace. Type a quotation mark in the Find what box and another in the Replace with box, and click Replace All. Word will replace every curly quotation mark with a straight one. Do the same with an apostrophe. For long dashes, type ^+ in the Find what box (that is Word's code for the long dash) and two hyphens in the Replace with box.

5. Why the schedule would not line up. In the printed newsletter I line up the anthem schedule with tabs: the date at the left margin, the anthem at two inches, the soloist at four and a half. On the Web it all ran together in one line. A Web browser pays no attention to tabs and squeezes any number of spaces down to one, so nothing you line up with the space bar or the Tab key will stay lined up. The answer is a table, with one row for each Sunday and one cell for each column. A table is less trouble to type than you would think, and the enclosure shows one.

6. The cure. This is how I do it now, every month. It takes about forty minutes, most of it reading.

(a) Write the issue in Word as always, with smart quotes turned off (paragraph 4(c)).

(b) Run Edit, Replace for quotation marks, apostrophes and long dashes, in case any came in from somewhere else (paragraph 4(d)). Anything pasted from an e-mail is a likely suspect.

(c) File, Save As, and under Save as type choose Text Only. Word will warn that you will lose your formatting. That is the point. Click Yes.

(d) Open the text file in Notepad and add a few tags: the page title at the top, <P> between paragraphs, <B> around the headings, and a table for the anthem schedule. Nothing else.

(e) File, Save As in Notepad, with Save as type set to All Files, and a name ending in .html. Otherwise Notepad adds .txt to the end and you will spend an evening wondering where your page went. (I did.)

(f) Upload it with the GeoCities.us File Manager, open it in Netscape and in Internet Explorer both, and read it through one more time. Then go to bed.

7. A note on the newsletter itself. I have not put the address of The Choir Loft on this page. It carries our members' names, their birthdays and our prayer list, and it is meant for them. This memorandum is for editors.

8. Questions. I am glad to help any church secretary or newsletter editor who is fighting the same fight. Write to me at [email protected]. I answer in the evenings, after rehearsal on Thursdays.

LMcK/lmck
Enclosure: Before and After
cc: Carolyn Knouse, Director of Music

Read by since this memorandum went out.
Last updated September 16, 1999