Sweeter'n Sugar, Pg 4

The Daily Grind Table of Contents

     The first "personal computers" began coming out back in the early-1980s when I was in high school. My friends were all more into them than I was, and Dan Goodsell gave me some advice when Mr. Noser was teaching us to program in Basic on TRS-80 machines with cassette-tape storage drives. To make a computer work correctly, Dan said, you have to think like an idiot.

     That little phrase has served me well the past 25 years doing the HTML to get these webcomics showing up on your computational device. I mean, you forget one little quotation mark in HTML, and the whole page'll slip over completely skeways. But now? Now, I'm apparently unable to think like enough of an idiot all of a sudden.

     The past five years, I've been typing the text part of these pages into Microsoft Word. I then copy and paste it into the ancient graphics program I use, a thing called Paint Shop Pro. And until last week, no matter what weird font I chose - and I've chosen some wacky ones - it copies right into Paint Shop as a lovely little bitmap that looks just like the page I typed in Word.

     For this story, I decided to use the font Calibri. It was the default font in Word up until recently, and I figured that'd make it nice and innocuous for Gana telling us this whole story we're diving into. But when I copy the document from Word into Paint Shop, it comes out in Times New Roman.

     All I can guess is that it's the equivalent of forgetting a quotation mark in HTML. Some virtual switch isn't being flicked, and I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. I've tried a couple things, and they've managed to get the right font to show up, but the margins are slightly off. The text when laid into Paint Shop comes out with the lines shifted from the original version in Word.

     I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm working over mutliple operating systems. I often do the initial writing on machines running Windows 10 and 11, but the machine where I put everything together is quite happily running Windows 7, thank you very much. It doesn't get to go out on the internet, but, well, it's always been something of a homebody...

     Right now, I've got the first four pages looking more or less the way I want them to, but be aware there may be changes coming if things get too ungainly. Or maybe I'll finally get myself to think like the proper sort of idiot, and all my problems will be solved!

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