Opinions needed!!! Question about formatting · 4:04am Sep 14th, 2017
Hi, all,
I need some important information: when you read a story on this website, do you use the default background or a darker background? If you'd rather answer a poll, click here to see it on Twitter.
What's up, you may ask?
The reason I'm asking is due to the previous FIM Fiction update: the site now automatically deletes extra line breaks. As you may recall, there are a couple moments in "Sensation" that make use of the extra space, and a recent re-read showed me that it's now gone. While this isn't necessarily a huge loss, it's still taken away a tool from my writer's tool belt and fundamentally changed how a couple key moments read, and that makes me a sad pony.
My workaround is tiny, white periods that act as a new "paragraph," but I want to know how many people that would distract, since it may appear on the black background. Also, if anyone else has any suggestions that don't involve just posting the story somewhere else, please let me know! Maybe use a tiny, tiny image?
Thanks!
Vivid
I use the default. But I also tend to download longer fics and read them on my kindle and I have no idea what that'll do.
I would vote in the poll, but twitter is literally ass cancer.
Default for me. Note to self, don't use multiple spacings for effect, thanks for the heads up!
I use the darker background myself.
Medium dark
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One of my best friend's mom died of colon cancer. Grow up.
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Thanks for the info! I think I've found a workaround that doesn't require the white periods, so hopefully it will work well.
And jxj: I'll try not to get too obnoxious with them. I'm also interested in how it looks on a kindle. Have you taken a look at Sensation on there?
4668783
The version I have is an older one, but I downloaded the most recent version. Typically what I do is download anything longer than 20,000 words, anything shorter I typically read on my phone. So i've been reading chapters recently on my phone, but when I first started Sensation (and when I inevitably re-read it) it was on my kindle.
It tends to mess up things that aren't just text. Pictures and videos (in general, don't think you have videos) just aren't there. Fancy typesetting (fonts, spacing, colored text) can get messed up as well. As an example, the letters from characters don't have the black bar on the left side (although they indent) and authors notes aren't in a box. Links technically work, but the kindle browser is really bad. Kindles can adjust fonts (type and size), margins, line spacing so things that require a certain spacing, or font tends to break.
kindles also have black/off-white screens so anything with color doesn't work either.
for future reference, your white circle idea would probably work. I looked at the epub formatting and the screen is "white" (even though the screen isn't physically capable of making this color) so the circles probably wouldn't show up.
So there's some overall kindle formatting tips. You don't do all of them, but i figure it's good for future reference.
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Stop being butthurt. It's just the internet.
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That's quite an extensive list of observations! Thanks for sharing these with me. I'll save them and reference them in the future.
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the short version is that the further away from plain text you get, the less likely it is to transfer over. But for the most things works out. It's easy to point out when it doesn't work because it's so uncommon.
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Awesome! Will you use it in the future? the work around I mean. Would you mind sharing how you did it?
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It turns out you can use what's called an "en space." You can find it between these brackets: [ ]. I recommend copying and pasting if you need it, since I don't know the keyboard shortcuts for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_(typography)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character
I also realized that it's the html tags that break it. Spaces work regularly between other lines of text.