Formatting? · 5:42pm Jul 2nd, 2015
It was brought to my attention a few weeks ago that some of my readers may be having problems with the formatting of my stories. I wanted to briefly survey the audience and see how everyone's holding up.
I realize the modus operandi of most of this site is to include a space between paragraphs. I've always hated that, though; it was one of the things I disliked the most about Fanfiction.net. I much prefer to format my stories like a printed book, with indents to mark the paragraph changes. It's how I'm used to writing, and I think its overall effect is much nicer.
On that note, I have just recently discovered that FIMFiction has an 'indent paragraphs' button, which might make my indents easier to see. I may be going back through Besides the Will of Evil and modifying the indents- though I may wait until the story's end, since it's going to be a long undertaking. Once the story is done (and we are coming quite close, as many of you readers have guessed), I'm going to give the whole story a work-over to fix some of the old formatting mistakes. I'll be adding horizontal rules between scene breaks, I'll be cleaning up run-on sentences, and generally making the whole work easier on the eyes.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated. If you're having trouble reading the story, please let me know.
It might not be your formatting choices necessarily. The on site epub downloads don't retain a lot of the formatting in stories even though third party plugins grab the individual chapter html files which do keep everything.
As for your book like formatting, I completely agree, that is the way to go as the majority of my reading is done on an ereader.
The indent paragraphs button can cause some issues. In my experience, it won't indent the very first paragraph (easy enough to remedy), and can mess up centered lines, if you have any. It's been a while since I used it, though, so there's always the possibility things have changed.
I prefer gaps between paragraphs, but indenting is fine. I didn't notice which you were using until you mentioned it and I went and checked.
It doesn't need to take very long. Find your favorite text editor that supports finding/replacing extended characters (or find an online text replacer app) copy your text from the Fimfic editor and run a replace operation, replacing "\t" with "\r\n", do that for every chapter, make sure that the formatting is correct in special cases.
It's a little more complicated if you have a number of spaces instead of a tab, or if you have an arbitrary number of spaces or tabs (which requires regular expressions) but it's still no big thang.
Hrm... 43 chapters is still quite a bit of replacing, though. But at least you don't necessarily have to do it by hand.
For feedback, though, I personally don't care. My stories do both tabs and spaces, but it winds up with an awful lot of white space when I don't have long paragraphs, and I probably should stick to just one.
Spaces or double returns between paragraphs are easier for me to read.
Tabs vs spaces: just as heated a debated in writing as in programming. :p
Personally I don't mind either indentation (the print convention) or spacing (the web convention). I find the indentation with spacing that occurs a lot on this site quite ugly though (some sort of manuscript convention, as far as I can tell). But all are better than this local newspaper I see sometimes which has no paragraph separation at all (shudder).
I feel like there should be a site feature to format all text with spacing, indentation or whatever according to your reading preferences – it's more a reader preference than an author preference. Especially considering it's fairly easy to get the effect by editing the site CSS at the moment.
i.imgur.com/rjr9rPG.png
i.imgur.com/EFrDWlY.png
And the opposite way:
i.imgur.com/ZfnMqIZ.png (You can't indent the first paragraph, but really that's the one paragraph you don't need to indent for readability.)
I have no problem with the way you format. It's how I format my work. It's certainly easier than going back through your entire story and wasting precious time and energy to reformat it just because a small handful of malcontents complain.
I actually prefer your format. I think it's classier.
...even though I don't use it myself. Lol.
Honestly though, the complaints that arise from such a thing... You'd think people had never read an actual book before.
3202205 Or maybe it's because there are some fundamental differences in a page of a book and a web page? I don't have any books that have pages half a meter wide, nor any books which have resizeable pages.
The only thing I personally care about with formatting while reading, is how easy it is to read. And for me, indentation really only works when the "aspect ratio" of the text is close to that of a book. Which means that I have to fiddle with the window size, or I'm constantly slightly annoyed by the extra effort required for reading. Basically, when the indented text it too wide, for me it becomes a less serious version of a wall of text. I wouldn't say that "It's not as bad as a wall of text" is exactly a compliment..
Now, as I said, I can relatively easily fix that by resizing the window so that the text is close to how it would look in a book (and I slightly prefer indentations in books), but I would still prefer spacing on a web page. Of course, it would be best if you could just let the reader select how the formatting would look like, but that would require updates to the site.
As a general comment, I don't see why people keep just copying books directly to e-books, formatting and all, including formatting that first emerged as a cost-saving measure. You could do so much more with e-books than just copy the printed book. I have seen some experimenting, but it seems to be quite rare.
You and me, both! But honestly, I tend to format however's easiest for my readers, and that's pretty much spaces between paragraphs. And then I still indent, 'cause I have to have indented new paragraphs.
Well I'd certainly prefer it spaced, but if you don't want to do it that way I'd understand.
I have to agree with CDRT 3202390 Spacing is almost always used in online formats because it is much easier to read in the variety of conditions people might be reading in. Indenting is great for books but a large number of readers are reading on a surface much bigger than the page of a book, and will be reading lines of text longer than most books are tall.