More Clancy - another Forgotten Futures update - and holidays

[ffutures]

Another bit I forgot from The Bear and the Dragon

One of the characters is a Japanese / American CIA agent. He's in China posing as a Japanese computer salesman from NEC Japan.

His cunning master plan is to make contact with the secretary of a chinese Cabinet member while selling her a special Chinese character printer, seduce her, then get her to install a Trojan to monitor everything she types for her boss. In other words, he's going to put himself at the complete mercy of a woman who must be a loyal enough Party member to be trusted by a member of the Cabinet.

Can anyone suggest any plausible reason why it wouldn't be easier and a LOT safer to have the printer driver disk also install the Trojan? Especially since he wants to get it onto more computers, and if they print to the same printer they'll need the same drivers...


In other news, I forgot to say that having tried more solutions to the HTML conversion thing, and not liked any of them much, I decided to start doing it the old way, in a text editor. I've now got about a third done, so it looks like I was worrying about nothing. It turns out that being a bit rusty on HTML isn't a huge handicap, because I've been using the editor's built in HTML coding features more than I used to, and they are making things a lot easier. Also, the most complicated tables are, of course, just variants on similar tables in the main Forgotten Futures rules, which are already HTML, and it's easy to paste in the old version and make the changes, rather than doing it all from scratch.


I'm coding on my PC (with a high-resolution widescreen monitor) and viewing the results in Opera, I have the files on the network and also check everything in Safari on the iBook (conventional format and lower res) as I make changes. This is working very well - several times things have worked fine on the wide screen then gone horribly wrong when I looked at them in Safari. Sometimes this is just errors in the way text flows which can be fixed by changing the size of a graphic or something, other times the errors are less... forgiveable. Opera is sometimes a bit too tolerant of code errors - for example, I centred some text in a list and forgot to put it back to left justified; in Opera the next list item and rest of the document were left-justified, in Safari the rest of the document was suddenly centred. Usually I catch this sort of thing fairly late, working this way means I spot it a lot faster, and correct it much more easily.

A question for the HTML enthusiasts - is there any HTML command that does the equivalent of a section break? e.g. I have some text running alongside a graphic. I want to start a new block of text below the bottom of the graphic rather than alongside it, but don't want to have a lot of empty space if I put too many line breaks. I've been using BR CLEAR="ALL" but I think I'm right to say that not all browsers support it. Any better suggestions?

When I hear back from Jo I will probably have to make a few corrections, but that just means I'll have to correct two documents, not one, and I can live with that.

Another hour or so and the kids will go off to church, and I can go round the labs and shut everything down for the summer and save a small fortune on electricity. I was expecting to have to work tomorrow, but fortunately the building will have no power due to rewiring, and everyone has been told to stay home. So after this afternoon I won't have to be in work until the 18th of August. I can relate to that...

Comments

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

I thought the biggest technical flaw in 'The Bear and the Dragon' was that the Chinese tanks didn't fall apart before they even got into combat with the Russians. Judging by Chinese-made goods that reach the West they'd make their tanks so that the turrets unscrewed themselves as they rotated, the tracks wouldn't be connected up properly and they would unroll as the tanks drove, and the infantry rifles would eject their magazines as the troops pulled the triggers. Or do they have special crap production lines set up to make goods for export?

Of course the huge underground fuel dumps of the Russians would all have been emptied and sold off by the Mafiya anyway...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Cynic!

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

<br clear="all"> is ancient enough that I don't think I've used it in more than ten years. Are there really browsers that don't understand it? Which ones?

The "right" way to do it is with CSS, but mixing old-style HTML formatting with stylesheets is a recipe for serious SAN loss.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Not sure - I thought it wasn't universally supported, but maybe I'm just out of date.

I'm probably worrying over nothing, since the PDF will be the primary version anyway. Hopefully most people will never even look at the HTML.

[draconin.livejournal.com]

I want to start a new block of text below the bottom of the graphic rather than alongside it, but don't want to have a lot of empty space if I put too many line breaks.

The usual way that I've done this is with a table. One row, two columns, variable width of cells but fixed width of table at 100%, borders set to zero, cell spacing to about 3 or 4 pixels. Put the graphic in one cell and the text that you want to be beside it in the other. Put the next section of text below the table. Voila.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm doing that sort of thing where I can, but it gets a bit unmanageable sometimes since I also have main text and sidebar text in tables, sometimes tables within tables within tables, and so forth.

Since Clear="All" seems to be more universal than I thought I'll stick with it.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Problem with this - and the linebreaks method - is that if someone needs to change the text size, the flow breaks....

You could put the image inline with a decent border spacing, and just flow the text.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm only using the linebreaks at the end of "chapters" so it isn't a huge problem. I do flow around most graphics, but sometimes things get more complicated...

[dsample.livejournal.com]

You can do it using the CLEAR attribute in your style sheet.

For example you could define the style:

.SectionHeader {clear: both;}

and then in your body have something like

<H1 class="SectionHeader">New Chapter Title</H1>