anna genoese

Oh God. All you had to say was Word to Wordperfect and I started to hyperventilate. A few years ago, I had a copyeditor do an onscreen edit in Word (normally we did copyedits on paper, but we had six weeks cut from our production schedule, and so on, editorial and production heroics ensue). I then sent the file to the author, who swore he had Word and could work on the files, but said that he liked Wordperfect better. He then decided on his own that he didn't want to use Word, because he hardly ever did, converted everything to Wordperfect, did his changes, and sent it back.

All the changes...his, the coypeditor's...were in green. And permanent. I couldn't tell what he'd done, and what the copyeditor had done, or go back and undo anything to figure it out. And...to make a long story short, I had to do a very long, onscreen comparison of files and make everything work by hand, so we could keep the production schedule.

And yes, he was the sort of person who was sending me line changes every single day too, and darned snarky about it because in the middle of this he went on vacation where he could not be reached by phone, fax, or email without prior arrangement. He is on my Black List Forever.

Word/Wordperfect conversions...shudder. Shudder, shudder. Bad flashback empathy.