Some years ago, Lin got a panic call from a friend who'd written a book, had it reviewed by several friends, had a contract with a publisher and printer, and needed some help with "final setup."

She agreed to help him, but when the "book" arrived, we learned that he had typed the entire book in upper case (Caps lock on) because "he thought it would be easier for the reviewers to read."

The book was on 5.25" floppies, mostly one chapter per floppy.

At the time we had one DOS computer with Word (DOS) and one with Windows 3.11 also with WinWord and Pagemaker. The drop-dead date for getting it back to the printer gave us 3 days to convert everything, proof, do the layout, and produce the postscript print files that were then the common book publishing "printer input," and get it express mailed to the printer. Fortunately, it was "only about 900 pages."

The basic conversion to all lower case was simple enough with the Word "case-flip" but the exceptions for names and place names that need initial caps was a b!tch. (We used a lot of "global replace" edits.)

We got it done and to the printer, just barely; but it was not something you'd want to do on a regular basis.

We never heard whether The History of Alcoholics Anonymous in West Virginia^** ever made the best seller lists, but I think we can guess that the author probably bought most of the copies that got sold, at least the first year. At least it's history now, and the author was about the "last one standing" with the first hand knowledge to write it.

^** I'm guessing on the title, but I think that's close.

John