Formatting Text for Newsletters, Autoresponders, Broadcasts and Articles

By Kathy Sparks

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Well, that's one way to format your text newsletter to 65 characters per line, but is it really?

I can't tell you how many times I've formatted messages and tested them only to either need to edit them, changing all of the hard returns and line lengths causing me to go through the whole thing and straighten every line out once more. Of course, when I send them to my clients for approval, they normally have a few adjustments to make, add a few lines or words which again causes me to reformat the whole thing again. This didn't happen just once to me and I know if you are reading this article, it's probably happened to you more than once.

How about sending out the broadcast to the whole list with one line twice as long as the rest of the message – embarrassing, isn't it?

Frankly, I'm pretty lazy when it comes to this type of project and I'm always on the hunt to make it simpler. I've found numerous sites with templates, instructions, what to do, what not to do, but nothing that is e-a-s-y.

Until now!

I'd like to tell you about a utility that does it for you. I've used this utility for the past three months and am amazed at what else I can do with it besides format newsletters and broadcasts. That's a given. I simply copy my text into the top box, choose how many characters I want per line and hit go. It's done!

The name of the utility is WordWrapMagic at www.wordwrapmagic.com

The one thing I need to do to make the paragraphs come out correct is to double space between each paragraph. If my client has adjustments, I just recopy the whole document into my utility program and reformat it. It literally takes a few seconds and saves hours of time.

Have you ever sent out a text newsletter or broadcast and the result was something like this: " Sounds of Spring: Did you know that birds make two different types of songs? One ‘song’ is a warning sound. It is flat, sharp and insistent. The other is it’s "

See those strange characters? Those are slanted quotes created in the Word document. If they are not changed to straight quotes before you send out your broadcast or text newsletter, they come out something like the example above. WordWrapMagic takes care of that for me automatically.

The program actually does more.

I've found that I can take a text document that is formatted at 65 characters per line with hard returns – the articles you find in Yahoo! Groups for instance – copy it into the top box and choose a line length of 500 or 1000 and hit go. This takes out those hard returns automatically. The document is ready to put in a Word Doc or in a web page without going through the whole article to delete the hard returns.

Then, the other day, I needed to convert a PDF document into an html web page. Without having a conversion utility, I was able to easily reformat the PDF. Here's how. I loaded the document as a PDF file, chose File, Save As and saved it as a text file. The right margin saved with hard returns in the text format and I needed to get rid of them before adding the document to my html page. Instead of going through every line to delete the hard returns, I simply copied the whole thing in WordWrapMagic's top box, double spaced where the paragraphs were supposed to be, entered 1000 characters per line, hit go and my document was ready to drop into my html program.

If you are looking for a utility to help in your day to day publication efforts, I highly recommend WordWrapMagic.

Kathy Sparks, Professional Virtual Assistant and Online Business Manager, has partnered with clients nationwide in a multitude of professions. Visit http://www.yourvirtualresource.com to receive your copy of "Connected Virtually, an E-memo, " tips for working virtually.