Safehold Synopsis

Over the last year I have prepared a written synopsis of the entire 9-volume Safehold series. It summarizes all of the action and story lines in chronological order, identifying them by month and volume/page. As you may surmise, it is quite long (62 pages).
I prepared it primarily for my own benefit (and probably to kill some time, now that I'm retired), but it occurs to me that other Safehold junkies night like to have a copy. I originally prepared it in WordPerfect format (my text editor of choice), but I have also created MSWord and PDF versions, and will share it with any forum member who requests it.
If you want a copy, send your email address to me (philstan@rcn.com) along with a note telling me which format to send you. There will be no charge.
Enjoy!

***Off topic***

Nice to see somebody else who prefers WordPerfect to Word.

WordPerfect was (and still is) my text editor of choice, too. I always considered it much more powerful than Word (try doing a paragraph sort in Word!), and the ability to open that second window to see the formatting codes, and to be able to search and replace at least some of them, is sheer gold. Finally, I found it has always been a lot less likely to try second-guessing me. I really do dislike programs that alter what I type – I can see the positives, but to my mind the negatives far outweigh them.
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Peter2 wrote:***Off topic***

Nice to see somebody else who prefers WordPerfect to Word.

WordPerfect was (and still is) my text editor of choice, too. I always considered it much more powerful than Word (try doing a paragraph sort in Word!), and the ability to open that second window to see the formatting codes, and to be able to search and replace at least some of them, is sheer gold. Finally, I found it has always been a lot less likely to try second-guessing me. I really do dislike programs that alter what I type – I can see the positives, but to my mind the negatives far outweigh them.
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I still remember a call I got from the receptionist shortly after I started at a new company. It was taking her minutes to type a single letter into the WP 4.2 document she was typing. I went out check her windows 3.0 Zenith 1mb 286 machine (yeah, it was that long ago) and saw that every time she typed 1 letter into the 2 line typing window, the 20 line code display window (or whatever the number of lines was) would slowly update before allowing her to type another letter. The code display window consisted mostly of Bold On, Bold Off, Italic On, Italic Off combinations, with absolutely no characters being modified. We cleaned up that poorly formatted document and she was happy for a day or 2.

I have to say, I have never felt the need to sort paragraphs.

I created my synopsis in WordPerfect, and used MSWord's import function to create the MSWord version. I then had to go through the entire MSWord file to clean up the usual import-created glitches and pagination problems. Based on my experience doing this I'm definitely reassured that WordPerfect is easier to work with than MSWord. Working with MSWord immediately brings to mind that old quotation: "If things don't improve soon, I'm going to ask you to stop helping me!" So many of MSWord's features are designed to facilitate specific ways of creating/editing, and if that's not your exact style, they end up getting in the way and slowing you down.
The explicit, straightforward features of WordPerfect allow you a lot more control over your output, and in many cases allow it to function neatly as a "mini desktop publisher program". It's definitely my editor of choice!
Philip Stanley

Philip Stanley wrote:I created my synopsis in WordPerfect, and used MSWord's import function to create the MSWord version. I then had to go through the entire MSWord file to clean up the usual import-created glitches and pagination problems. Based on my experience doing this I'm definitely reassured that WordPerfect is easier to work with than MSWord. Working with MSWord immediately brings to mind that old quotation: "If things don't improve soon, I'm going to ask you to stop helping me!" So many of MSWord's features are designed to facilitate specific ways of creating/editing, and if that's not your exact style, they end up getting in the way and slowing you down.
The explicit, straightforward features of WordPerfect allow you a lot more control over your output, and in many cases allow it to function neatly as a "mini desktop publisher program". It's definitely my editor of choice!
Philip Stanley

Absolutely, there is no doubt that there is a major difference between the way WP does things and the way Word does them, and having gone through an entire office converting from WP 4.2 to Word whatever-it-was I agree that it is absolutely no fun. However, once converted, and trained, and i have to say that many of the people in the office were older and much less flexible in their willingness to learn, everyone was mostly happier with Word than WP, especially the way it managed the screen. On the other hand, i have an acquaintance, a popular Hugo and Nebula winning author, who swears by Wordstar 5. So what ever lets you get the job done is great.