Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related The (Archive) Times They Are A-Changin'

Some of you may have noticed that, in addition to stories on the Archive now being offered in a range of formats, new stories added in recent weeks have also been uploaded in HTML.

You can still choose to read in plain text if you choose, just by clicking on one of the little coloured icons attached to each story.

The inclusion of HTML as a reading format means that we no longer have restrictions on submitted stories with regards to simple formatting - such as italics, bold and so on. Authors are now free to include these in submitted stories if they choose.

To accomodate that, you'll need to submit your story as a WORD doc, rather than a text doc. If you don't have WORD as standard and don't want to pay for it, there are many free programs that you can also use to submit your stories such as OpenOffice, Abiword and Google Docs, which will support the use of bold and italics.

Further down the line, Lauren plans other innovations, such as a drop-down menu which will enable you to choose different colour choices for the background and fonts in HTML, but for now it's just basic.

I'd like to thank Lauren for all of her recent hard work on getting these new, exciting choices for our readers on stream.

LabRat

Thank you Lauren, LabRat, and anyone else who has contributed to giving us all of these new choices on the archive.

Joy,
Lynn

Umm... yeah...

Of course, this now means I will have to actually get to work on my Word2Board-Markup converter so I can write fanfic with actual italics in Word and not have to type out the markup. Oh, and actually get back to *writing* new fanfic. *sigh*

On an unrelated note: Since a couple of awesome FoLCs are already in the process of converting the old stories and putting them on the wiki, are there already any plans for migrating the stories into the main archive? Yeah, I know, it's the whole 'little finger/entire hand' thing, but what can I say

Oh, and before I forget: How's the conversion stuff being handled? Especially, how do you convert the italics etc. stuff to e.g. asterisks for the txt-format? Or are those lost? I'm guessing it's not *that* big a deal since most FoLCs will go for the rich formats anyway. I know I certainly will. And not just because Opera Mobile doesn't like plaintext and I always have to switch to Internet Explorer when I want to read a story form the archive.

And last but not least: FoLCdom certainly is an awesome group, having an official archive, editors, *and* multi-format publishing. So, yeah... /points to first line of post since the max number of graemlings is already reached/

Michael

Edit: I know, Lauren experimented with the letter Z, and the remaining pages are still in the old format. But this also means the new formats are only linked on the What's New page, not on the Author and Title pages. Hope you don't mind me mentioning it

YAY!

Double YAY. I have Word. To those on System 7, I recommend using the Word 2003 compatibility mode. More machines have less trouble reading it.
When I get around to submitting "Nighttime in the Daytime" it has several relevant pictures (.jpg) Any hope of including those too?
Many thanks to all the hard work to all the FOLCs who did it.
regards
Artemis

Yeah. I knew some of you would start blinding me with science the minute I posted.

I'm not sure what this refers to, but Lauren did mention something about working on the /stories2 folder, but temporarily switching her attention to something else with the aim of getting the Kerth-nominated stories this year into epub and Kindle format.

No clue if that answers your question, Michael. This is Lauren's domain, I'm afraid, not mine. So I'm fairly clueless.

I have no idea on the specifics of the conversion process, but I assume Lauren has it covered.

I'm assuming that Lauren will be working on that at some point. At the moment, I assume that she's concentrating on the basics. I know that RL has been pretty much slapping her around lately and her free time has been extremely limited - which is why I'm all the more impressed that she's managed to get this done. I think the fine detail will be waiting until she has a little bit more breathing space elsewhere. I know that at such times in the past, when it comes to uploads, she pretty much concentrates on getting the basics done and then leaves updating the indexes until she has the time to catch up. I figure she's working to the same principle here for now.

You can try emailing her for the answers to your questions - she'll know better than I would - but you might have to wait for a reply for a little bit.

We have no plans to include pictures on the Archive at this time.

LabRat

Many many thanks to Lauren and LabRat and everyone else working behind the scenes to make FoLCdom so incredibly awesome! These changes are fantastic.

Thanks for the thanks and enthusiasm, LabRat, Lynn, Michael, Queen of the Capes, Artemis and Deja Vu.

Michael, your converter sounds cool. And please write some new fanfic!

Michael wrote about the epub files accessible from the wiki:

Yes, but it'll take a while.

Not at all. We're on two tracks: New stories going forward (via the What's New page) and older stories as we get to them (via the wiki). And they'll intersect when all stories in the archive have been reformatted for consistency (about 800 finished so far) and the database is driving the site. That's when all formats will be available from all the catalog pages. When will that be? Uhhh... [takes nervous look at growing collection of programming books]

Speaking of the wiki, Doranwen deserves a round of applause for her marathon effort. She looks to be in the process of going through Wendy Richards' stories, and we have about 250 stories in epub format now, the majority of which were converted by Doranwen. On behalf of epub e-reader fans everywhere, thank you, Doranwen!

You bring up interesting questions, Michael. I'm thinking Word to simple HTML, then a script to convert opening and closing italics tags to asterisks. I'm hoping it'll be that simple. Having seen what kind of tag soup can result from what should be a simple bit of formatting, though -- multiple font, formatting tags on and off within a single sentence, for example (Dreamweaver circa 2000, you still give me nightmares) -- I should know better than to assume, but I'm hoping. And I did buy an XSLT book, along with an XML book, a regular expressions book, a CSS book, and yet another PHP/MySQL book. My eyeballs are spinning, my brain is in shock, but Amazon loves me.

LabRat wrote:

Thanks for covering for me, LabRat! Things are beginning to look up.

Artemis wrote:

I'd love to see an illustrated version of your story, Artemis. It'd be nice to be able to do that on the archive, but it'd add another layer of complexity. Also, I'm a chicken about hosting LnC photos on the site. In the past when TPTB have gone after fan pages, it's usually been for images and other media. Though it's been a long time since I've read about a forced takedown like that, and it hasn't touched our fandom much (some Buffy sites, I remember), it sticks with me.

Artemis, I remember from your previous posts that you like to read PDFs on your e-reader. I hope you don't mind that we're using the PDFs with printing in mind -- thus the two-column format. Are the epub or mobi versions working out for you? Was it you who said the heading size of the title was forcing the size of the body text to be off-kilter, or something like that? We can change that. Please let me know if you have suggestions to improve readability.

Anyone who has a problem with our epubs and mobis, please let me know. I've been testing on Kindle and the iPod Touch Stanza app, but I haven't seen what the files look like in the Sony Reader, the Nook and the universe of other e-readers out there. It's still early in the game, so we can more easily fix problems now.

I think I change my mind every week about little formatting things. Before we pile up a lot of stories for 2011, I'll go back and make things consistent.

But a big change I think we should do soon: offer files in Word .doc instead of OpenOffice's .odt. Even though OpenOffice can read and write Word's .doc, I don't think the reverse is true. And I'm guessing more people have Word instead of OpenOffice, even though OpenOffice is a free alternative. I admit to being an OpenOffice proponent and love the idea of promoting its use, but it'd probably be more practical to put stories out there in Word.

Lauren

Yeah, what she said. See? Told you she was the techie one.

LabRat

Hi Lauren:
First, not to worry on my pics in "Nighttime in the Daytime." They are astronomy photos from NASA and the Planetary Society, no LnC photos since I'm really changing the story. I was just hoping to inform readers what a solar eclipse was if they really didn't know. But I totally understand the other layer of complexity to the Archive. Maybe the answer is a link akin to the big chart for Nan's Home series. That is multiple .jpgs. So I could do that at the end of the story. I always enjoyed Wendy's illustrated stories, but I see that could get us in trouble and we really don't want that.

I've converted stories from the Archive to .pdf and just used one column. I read that vertically. I guess I could do two columns if I switch to horizontal mode, but I don't know how I would enjoy that. So I would say yours will be great for printing, which a lot of people enjoy, but I travel so much I enjoy my reader and I can just do my own thing.

Yes, at the beginning there were some giant titles and miniscule story text. I had to go to Large instead of the usual Medium for the text. I don't know if one caused the other or not. I buy a lot of books and they are just fine. So whatever they do would be good to do the same. I haven't tried one in some time because I'm reading for the Kerth's. If I paste into Word 2003, they read fine on my Sony Reader. O.K., the beginning quotes on the end of one line don't go to the next line which is the quote, but I can live with it.

O.K., I'm with LabRat there. That just blew my mind. I could probably still code in Fortran, but that's it.


There's dancing in the streets! I've never done open office and I don't have any friends who do. So Word.doc makes me happy. (P.S. System 7 word is Word.docx and it is just fine not to mess with it. It has complexities we don't need for stories.) Now to a question about that. Do we go ahead and use bold or italics in our Word story and the system will pick up on that or should we used html coding? I tell you the Archive stories read a bit bland because there is no bold or italics. All you can do is *this* or <this>.

OH, and didn't someone say somewhere we could *submit* our stories in Word in the future?
(See how much better submit and even submit look?)

regards,
Artemis

Hi Lauren!

Don't worry. They won't attack you. At least not, unless you attack them first. /carefully rebandages papercuts on both hands/

Yeah, that *could/should* work with basic text stuff. I highly recommend saving it as docx (or odt), though. They're both zip-containers and contain the document as an XML file (yes, you can just rename them to *.zip and look inside ). Still tag soup, but you could automate a lot of it. Am still waiting for my .NET-based docx-to-UBB-code transformer to finish itself. Will probably have to lend it a hand sometime, though. Anyway, it's going to take the docx, extract the xml-document and pass that through an XSLT. And rendering nice plaintext instead of UBB-code shouldn't make that much of a difference. Probably more work to replace the ellipses, slanted quotes, m-dashes, etc, since they look just plain awful in ASCII...
Oh, and check out this one here:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.ziparchive-extractto.php
Plus, I can help you out with the XSLT. If you're willing to wait till March a.k.a. free-brain-time.

Re doc vs. odt for the Archive. Yeah, I'm guessing you get more portability that way. But either way, Open Office has no troubles with regular text, so... OTOH, Word 2007 and upwards can also deal with ODT, no clue though about the earlier Words...

Am working on it. Really. Managed an entire page in January. Okay, it's going to be a super short either way. And one that's season-themed. So, I'd better finish it till Monday after next.

Michael

Yes. Submit your story as a WORD file, if you want to include italics or bold within the story. It will be converted to HTML by Lauren when it's uploaded to the website.

LabRat

I just googled "PHP ODT" and voila, there's actually lots of hits

e.g. a PHP-bases ODT to HTML converter:
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/3071-PHP-Convert-documents-in-OpenDocument-format-to-XHTML.html

Apparently, a PHP-bases library for editing ODT files (not that it's truly needed for our use case)
http://pear.php.net/package/OpenDocument

And finally:
http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Reading-the-clean-text-from-DOCX-and-ODT-with-PHP/55040

Hope those help

Michael

I had a technical question.

I recently purchased a Kindle. I noticed in the archives that the green triangle was for Kindle. However when I click on the green triangle, it opens a document with a bunch of nonsense. I tried to save, but I can only save an HTML document. I know how to put ebooks on my Kindle, but I’m not sure how to make a story into an ebook.

If anyone can help, I would be very grateful!

Right,lcfan. All the epub or mobi type documents are garbage if you open them. It takes your reader to decode them. Instead of opening them, slide the icon to your desktop and then into your Kindle and it reads it.
At least that is my take on it. I haven't actually tried it myself.
It's they way the compress all that information into a much smaller file.
Hope this helps.
Artemis
Well, I can't get the epub document onto my reader. The icon won't make it go there. How do we do that? HELP

That's awesome! Thanks for all your hard work on that, guys.

Unfortunately clicking an icon won't automatically load an epub or mobi file into your e-reader. That would be an ideal way to go about it, but I don't know if that's even possible -- if so it's above my understanding.

So currently, getting the epub or mobi file into your e-reader is a multi-step process that involves downloading the file to your hard drive, then copying the file to your device, in whatever way your device supports.

lcfan99, have you tried right-clicking on the green icon and choosing the option "Save As" or "Save Link As" to save the Kindle-compatible mobi file to your hard drive? That's what I've been doing on my laptop running Windows.

Here's what I do to get archive stories onto my Kindle: Right-click on a green icon and save a mobi story to my hard drive. Once I've done that, I connect the Kindle to my PC with the Kindle's USB cable. The Kindle is then recognized as another drive by my PC. I load Windows Explorer (but you could use "My Computer" or any file manager) and then drag the mobi file from my hard drive into the Kindle's document folder. After I've unplugged the USB cable, the story shows up at the top of the Kindle's list of documents.

I know there are ways to e-mail documents to your Kindle's e-mail address, but I haven't tried that with mobi files. It ought to work, though.

If you're running on a Mac with a single mouse button, I'm not sure how you go about right-clicking to save a file to your hard drive, but I think you can left-click while holding down the Control key to accomplish the same thing.

Artemis, have you tried right-clicking to download the epub file to your hard drive? I guess each e-reader is a little different, but I'm guessing when you connect the Sony Reader to your PC it shows up as a drive just like the Kindle does. And then you'd copy the file over.

I've been meaning to do a Kindle tutorial and will try to do one soon. I\'ve done one already for getting epubs onto iPhone/iPod Touch Stanza but not yet one for Kindle.

I hope that helps! Please let me know if it didn't.

Artemis, I'm very curious about how our epubs look in the Sony Reader, so if you get it to work, could you let me know how it goes?

lcfan99, as for how to make a story into an ebook, I've been using two programs: Sigil , to make the epub file and define chapters for a table of contents; and Calibre , to convert the epub file to mobi, preserving table of contents. I tried using KindleGen to create mobi files, but the table of contents fell out. I guess Calibre could probably be used for the whole project, but Sigil makes it so darn easy. (Doranwen scouted out that program, and a wonderful find it is.)

Best wishes,

Lauren

P.S. Michael, I'm still digesting what you've written. Thanks for the links and the offer of help with XSLT! You may end up regretting that!

I'm still in the "See Spot run" stage with all this, so it'd be a long time before I'm in the position of framing intelligent questions.

It worked!
For me it is "save link as" and it comes up on the computer desktop as an story icon with the reader symbol (an open book) superimposed on it. The I do an "import file" like the Sony Reader instruction says and it goes to the list on the computer file for the Reader. Then I can just slide the story onto the handheld Reader file.
As for reading it, it looks great even in Small. Very pretty. I did Shane's Veritas and it took no time at all to load.
Now when I go to the page with the other epub stories, I do the same "save link as"? Because there are older stories I want too.
Thanks so much.
Artemis
P.S. Later in the morning. Yes! It works on the file of the fanfic converted to epub. Thank you all for your hard work.

I tried to do a right click, but it just saves it as an HTML document that my Kindle can't read. However, I did figure it out. I click on the HTML page, then do a copy & paste to Word. Then I use a ebook creator I found called "Mobipocket Creator". Because it's in HTML, I don't have to do the formatting that a text document requires. The Mobipocket Creator creates an ebook that my Kindle can read.

BTW, I’ve already created Kindle ebooks for a few stories on the archives. I don’t know if it would be helpful, but I can upload them somewhere.

lcfan:
You can't do a "save link as"? Sounds like you solved the problem but that is a lot more steps. I get the epub on my desktop without any further changing.
Anyway, the site for Archive stories that are not yet uploaded onto the Archive site and were transformed by other FoLCs into epubs is this:
http://www.lcfanfic.com/wiki/doku.php
I believe LaurenW is the only one who can upload to that site, so you need to send your converted stories to her. Her address is in a message on this thread above yours.
Glad you solved your problem.
regards
Artemis