The CHALLENGES I've faced!..

Just previously I was gushing. "The tale of the Spy"!..

Ever since the last (8^th) chapter I was wondering: what should the Spy do?.. The dramatism of that moment!.. There was no easy way... And what would he even DO afterwards?

That was in October of 2020. The ponies reached their tenth anniversary! A great rewatch was due!

...That was hectic as heck !

A whole year in -- and only "Daring Do..." was out! Forced hiati (or was it actually "hiatuses"?)... They didn't help. But at least "Manuskript" was discovered.

Unfortunately, work had to be done on the tool, because there were bugs. But that's exactly the reason to try software before its stability. Yes, I reported a bug. 'Twas impossible to plot! But at least I could outline characters' narrative threads and organise lore.

Seeking a job as if there had been no tomorrow... And then I revisited "...The Spy".

Narrative threads... Good.Now we can get down to business!

And I produced!.. Scene after scene! That was bizarre!

And that was time to face challenges. I can't say, whether organising everything had indeed helped me after all or I just got very creative... I believe it had... But eventually I would have to publish... Now, "Manuskript" supports many different publishing formats (and Pandoc does even more!), but none of them is native to Fimfiction.net. Just about anyone who's written anything on here knows: BBcode is used. That same one I had fun with a couple of weeks ago.

The question: how would I publish? It was not as if I typed my story in a single large document: splitting a chapter into scenes stored in separate files... I think it helps. And I did just that. To produce one chapter file, I needed to compile it.

And, despite a variety of output formats... there was no BBcode.

I conducted my research. Sneakily I produced a comparison table of what is the HTM that's seen on the site, what's the BBcode that's typed in to produce said HTM, and what my own, smarter format should be. And with that... I could publish my chapter in HTM... and later convert it to BBcode to submit on Fimf.

The problem was... "Manuskript" had chosen, for its internal editing format... Markdown. You know? that mark-down language from Github. Anyone? No Github users here? Come on, I know at least the site's staff has got to know it! It is a deal different from BBcode. But, hey -- the "Manuskript"'s editor was WYSIWYG: for I could see my formatting immediately in the editor. Pretty cool, huh?

So I used Markdown. And from it... I'd have to convert my chapter to BBcode somehow... How? Neither "Manuskript", nor Pandoc knew to produce in that format.

The solution was... to publish the chapter in some format of choice... And then to convert it. But that meant... That's right!.. Double conversion!.. [spooky noises]. And, even though I'd already figured out the similarities between HTM and BBcode, enough to write my own Lua script (solving problems with programming, eh?), the conversion between Markdown and HTM... It was... Urgh!..

Those darned line breaks! Consider this: [paragraph ends]

[after two line breaks another one starts, and it may display either as a blank line between the paras, or as this paragraph's first line indented]

[after three line breaks it displays actual line breaks]. That's how it is on Fimfiction.net, I'm sure you know.

...Not in Markdown. Nope! My glorious two-blanks between paragraphs! I've been using that in my stories, so why couldn't I have that?! For -- o would "Manuskript" eateth "extraneous" line breaketh!.. I had to learn, how to insert a line break verbatim!..

Nope. "Manuskript", out of three known ways, supports only a backslash! Before proceeding to the next line just insert a "\"!

And I inserted it. In each one of my two-blanks...

Oh, but that!.. wasn't the end! I had to get rid of block separators (an easy one, but, darn was it not obvious!). The number of line breaks produced out of one paragraph break!..

And then there were SOFT LINE BREAKS! I had to programme the writer to produce a whitespace, because otherwise there would be a line break (by default), because "Manuskript", for SOME reason, would place a soft line break in the source, even though I didn't ask for that!..

But then finally. Paragraphs were produced correctly! Line breaks were not lost, nor added!

...And then I discovered... that exclamation marks got eaten before opening square brackets...

Apparently, a combination of "![" inserts an image in Markdown! But in the process of conversion... "images", due to broken syntax (just closing tags in BBcode, really), were rendered as the mark-down that'd created them (just what I intended: to have BBcode in the resulting output)... but without "!". I have no idea why.

So this should be remembered, when typing in "Manuskript": ![ will eat the !!.

Also Markdown doesn't feel like supporting underlining things. But, hey! BBcode is not escaped! So, whatever you put in there, will stay that way in HTM and find its way to BBcode! So there's that: BBcode can be used in Markdown (and in HTM), if you convert to it later, because it'll stay.

And, besides! Thanks to the conversion most of my ellipses, and quotation marks, and apostrophes... are fancy !