Post #3399509
2026-03-18 14:40 UTC
#WritersCoffeeClub day 18: What's a writerly gift you've received?
The greatest, niftiest writerly gift I ever received was decades before I became a writer.
Back in the early '90s, I was working as a compositor/typesetter at a company that did newsletters focusing on the pharmaceutical industry. The reporters there would type up their stories in WordPerfect 5.1 (for DOS!), send them to me over some network that was a variety that I don't even recall anymore, and I'd run this... 1/7
Replies (1)
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@kagan@wandering.shop 2026-03-18 14:40
...over-engineered set of chained WordPerfect macros on them that would format and massage them and insert them into some very carefully-designed templates that would (if all went well) produce print-ready documents that we could slap onto the printing presses in the back room. (All usually went well, but hiccups occurred often enough to keep me on my toes, and to justify my salary when I resolved them.) 2/7 #WritersCoffeeClub