Guten [tag]

So I wanted to use something else for scene breaks other than the boring-looking [hr]...

There is, of course, no problem to just insert an image, and some people do this, but I also prefer to read in red on black (or amber on black, since Fimfiction offers me no red on black palette) because I almost invariably do this in the dark, and this is much easier on the eyes and on AMOLED tablet battery. If you do that, a black on transparent scene break image will just become invisible, and if you add a white outline, it will be visible and glare, ah-my-eyes.

But then I thought about the [icon][/icon] tag... Like most of Fimfiction bbcode it is not adequately documented, but it inserts named icons from FontAwesome. I'm not sure which particular version of FontAwesome we're dealing with here, but the nice bit about those icons is that they are essentially treated as text, which includes palette changes, positioning with the [center] tag and size changes. Which means I can pull stuff like this:

Looks ugly in source, but since I'm not doing this manually it makes no difference:

[size=0.5em][[b][/b]center][[b][/b]size=2em][[b][/b]icon]chevron-left[/icon] [[b][/b]icon]ellipsis-h[/icon] [[b][/b]icon]ellipsis-h[[b][/b]/icon] [[b][/b]icon]ellipsis-h[[b][/b]/icon] [[b][/b]icon]chevron-right[[b][/b]/icon][[b][/b]/size][[b][/b]/center][/size]

Which looks reasonably nifty, but there is one downside. Fimfiction's native epub export is already broken, in that it chews up all formatting, and all sane people use tools like FanFicFare to get their epubs. I can bet that none of these tools will pick up FontAwesome icons, and you will be left with an empty line instead.

I can, of course, post my own epub, which I'm generating anyway, and which looks right, because it's not converted from Fimfiction's bowdlerized HTML, but is made from the same Markdown source. But that would mean the readers would have to redownload it periodically without the aid of automated tools, which is suboptimal.

In short, meh, I'm not sure what to do.

Comments

[Cursed Quill]

I also prefer to read in red on black (or amber on black, since Fimfiction offers me no red on black palette)

That stops you?
CSS for Stylish as one option…
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document url-prefix("https://www.fimfiction.net/story/") { .content_format_amber_black { color: #FF0000 !important; } }

[Oliver]

4308452

That stops you?

This is primarily important on mobile (also because of AMOLED) and mobile Chrome doesn’t let you mess with CSS, so yes, kind of.