My Eccentric Ways

People may have noticed:

     That I use the "indent" tag in ways that it wasn't meant to be used to get comment and blog posts to look roughly the way I want them to look.  But now I may have found an actual way!

     I've been using the "pre" tag on other sites for decades when I want to make things look all square 'n' raggedy the way I like, but I'd never tried it here on FimFiction even after one of the last site redesigns took away my ability to indent just the first line of my paragraphs.  But I saw a blog post by Dave Bryant where he had the sort of indentation I was looking for.  So I dropped him a comment and asked him how he did it.

     Turns out it's a Mac thing he can do with Character Map and em-spaces and the like.  Not an option for a stodgy old Windows user like me, in other words.

     But in the discussion, I brought up the "pre" tag and thought I'd try it out.  And look!  Courier New!  Five space indents at the beginning of every paragraph while still having a blank line between the paragraphs themselves!  A look that pretty much every sapient creature in the multiverse despises but me!  Ha ha ha ha ha! 

     I probably won't switch to leaving all my comments in this style, though.  Probably...

                              Mike

Comments

[Wild Zontars]

And look! Courier New!

Lies! It's Lucida Console! (Actually, depending on your browser, it probably uses whatever font you have set as your default monospace choice, which on Windows is usually Courier New unless you change it.)

I actually miss doing plaintext formatting for documents, like we did back in the DOS and early Windows days, and still do in some niche applications.

[Georg]

Double spaces after periods foreveR!!

[Dragon Turtle]

5141952
Wait, I'm not the only one who does that? It's just a technique I learned in middle school, I just kept on doing it my whole life. It was only a few years ago I saw that authors on here didn't do the same thing.

[bookplayer]

You're adorable. Please leave all comments on my stuff in this style.

[Super Trampoline]

5141952
You horrify me.

[Corejo]

5141952
This. God, I can't tell you how much shit I get for this, and how hard the world has tried moving past what was a staple of my grade school computer learning.

[AugieDog]

5141946

Courier New:

     Is my favorite typeface.  I mean, it was the only typeface I had available to work in up through my college years.  To this day, stories don't look quite right when I'm writing them in anything else.  So if it wasn't the default, I'd have to set things up so it was.

5141952
5141955
5141975
5141979

     That continues to be the hardest thing about entering stories in the Writeoff.  The rules there mandate one space after a period.  I try to type them that way, but I always do a "find-n-replace" in Word before pasting the story into the entry box on the site.

5141972

     It's a deal!

                         Mike

[PresentPerfect]

5141988
I used to have to do that in the writeoff, too. :B

[TheJediMasterEd]

Jesus Christ. Somebody remembers the old rip'n'reads.

(Rip N. Reade is the name of ponified J. Jonah Jameson. SO SAY I SO SAY WE ALL.)

[ZanyZapper]

5141952
I remember learning to do that in HS typing class in the early 80s, but it didn't seem to stick. But I'm a programmer, not an author, so it isn't something that comes up for me. I doubt I've used two spaces like that since college.

[Georg]

5141988 The Writeoff submission process turns double spaces into singles, so you're doing extra work. :)

[Shrink Laureate]

I remember being taught to double-space, but there was never a reason given for it, so I found it easy enough to change.

I also remember them trying to teach me to write proper joined up writing that was so loopy and italic and refined it's just indecipherable. If they'd thought they could get away with making us use quill pens in Latin class, I'm sure they would have, it was that sort of school. It didn't stick at all, except the indecipherable bit. A decade or so later I got bored of writing like a drunk spider and made the effort to design my own hand that's neat, pleasant and nothing like the style they wanted.