Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls Archive Story Format - Plain Text or HTML?

I don't know if size is an issue with my next suggestion... But why not have the story in HTML for the archive and then offer another link for download of the story in .txt for those with the palm pilots?

Nope, Lara, your explanations have been clear and concise. Otherwise, I'd never email you and ask dumb questions.

I'm like Lara. How is that going to change the look of my fic? Maybe some would think that's just a silly thing, but I also don't want my fic to end up looking differently. It might be okay if the author approved the look first. I know I'd be mighty cranky though, if my fic was loaded with strange colors. I also hate reading fics with strange colors, and there have been a few that I just haven't read because of the headaches that the weird colors can produce. Sometimes if the fic seems really good, I'll convert it to text, but sometimes that doesn't work very well so it's just not worth it. And would the author still have a choice of fonts? I have vision problems, also, and some of them are a bear to read.

Darcy, about a month ago, I would agreed with you on the rtf. But since then, I've had a couple of betas sent to me that I haven't been able to open. I have no idea why, but that would be a bummer.

Well, by definition it would look differently. You'd submit the story as a plain text file and it would be uploaded in HTML format. The uploaded file would have a colour background and a particular font other than just plain Courier and would include italics/bold etc for emphasis where the author has indicated.

If - and it's still a very big if - the Archive was to switch to using HTML, we would work out a standard, hopefully neutral, colour/font scheme.

Letting individual authors choose different fonts, colours etc to suit their own individual taste would be way too cumbersome and time-consuming and we wouldn't want to go there. It would also look very messy, I think, if no two story files were the same. We're very big on standardisation on the Archive. We like to keep things simple.

However, HTML doesn't mean jarring colours. Here\'s an example of one of my fanfic uploaded to Annesplace in HTML. So there's absolutely no reason why an HTML format can't be entirely neutral.

ROTFL. Thanks, ML.

I imagine that having to store every story on the Archive twice would be both unwieldy and impractical, since it would double the size of the site. And mean double the work for Lauren, too. But perhaps Lauren knows differently on that one. Something to check out anyway.


LabRat

That's what I meant:

Wow... I even had to think some time about what I could have meant with that comment...

@Classicala:
Thanks a lot - I didn't know you could change the font in which the stories are shown

Best,
Jana

I'd greatly prefer HTML - I post my stories to several archives, the LC archive is the only one that doesn't use it, and every now and again I notice things like line breaks in the middle of paragraphs, at least once lines that didn't have breaks at all and scrolled off the screen to the right, and so forth. HTML doesn't have these problems, because inside a paragraph the line breaks are automatically inserted to fit the page, unless you put a line break command in the text.

Most of the archives that use it restrict the commands to the lowest common denominator, ones that can't do much harm - typically "center", "italic", "bold", "line break" and "paragraph break". A paragraph without any text formatting should be only seven characters longer than a plain text paragraph - (P) at the start - I'm using ( and ) instead of angle brackets - and (/P) at the end. This would be (I) Italic (/I), (B) bold (/B), or (CENTER)centered - sorry, cant't remember how to do this on the message board editor(/CENTER), and this would be a
(BR)line break.

The reason why HTML often appears to be much more bulky is that Word and Frontpage both produce hugely complicated HTML which tries to micromanage every letter of the document. If you write it in a text editor and keep it simple there is virtually no file size problem, and the results are considerably easier to read.

RTF and Word documents should be avoided - RTF gives different results (e.g. what the fonts look like) on different word processors, and Word can carry macro viruses.

Incidentally, one of the sites I post to, Twisting The Hellmouth, keeps the documents as HTML but has the option to read them as plain text - no idea how they do it, but that site has several thousand stories archived and the conversion is done on the fly, not by keeping two versions of the story, so it's obviously possible.

Ah, I see. Actually there's a very good reason why that's so...I just can't for the life of me remember what it is. I recall that, back in the day, it was done deliberately to solve a problem several readers had with the files. What that problem was however...you got me there. Lost in the mists of time...

Isn't it possible to save the story file to your pc, change the margins, and then print it out, if you want to use less paper? Can't say I've ever given it a try myself, but on the face of it, I can't see why you couldn't.

I do know that at one point, Lauren was experimenting with a program that would produce a page on the Archive where readers could just click on either option - HTML or Plain Text - as suited how they wanted it formatted for reading. I got the impression though that there were operational glitches that couldn't be ironed out. Or that Lauren is still working on trying to make it work for the Archive. It's certainly another idea worth pursuing though.

I'm still fascinated by how evenly the vote is working out so far. Back up to 50/50 as I post. Well, here anyway. Over on the Archive the vote is going more pro-text. Always in the past when we asked this one the vote was massively for text.

LabRat

I chose plain text.

Partially, I suppose, because I dislike change. ASCII text was good enough for my grand-pappy, gosh darn it, and it's good enough for me!

I've got a routine for stories I want to keep: Save from archive. Open from Word. Run a macro that takes out the hard line breaks. Do a Ctrl-A to select all and change the fonts. Tidy up the header information, then save as a .doc file. If it's a favorite and I'm feeling like it, I'll insert bookmarks in my file, so I can skip straight to the good bits but that's optional.

HTML would look prettier (well, depending on color scheme ) but the good thing about plain text is that it can be read by pretty much any browser, device, or word processing program ever made. HTML, otoh, might not be accessible to everybody (or take way too long to download). Still, it's worked for Annette all these years, so it can't be too awful.

PJ

p.s. To take out the hard line breaks while preserving the paragraphs:

Find all double hard returns (Ctrl F, ^p^p) and replace them with a character string that's not anywhere in the text -- I usually use ####. So that takes out the double hard returns (paragraph breaks) but lets you find them again later.

Then, find all the remaining hard returns, and replace them with a space (or possibly nothing, depending on how the file's been set up). That takes out the line breaks.

Last, search for your nonsense string (like ####) and replace it with one hard return. That breaks up the paragraphs again quite neatly. And since I've got it as a macro, it takes only a minute to do.

The major difference to me is the hard returns. .txt has to have them. The reason is Word Wrap. Browsers wrap text if it's in HTML format, but not if it's in txt. Also, some txt readers (especially the early ones) lack the Word Wrap feature.

In fact, that was the major selling point given the first time the archive suggested switching to HTML format. The story would have been in the same font, same black & white scheme, etc., but the words would wrap automatically. Bold, italics, etc were just icing on the cake.

Paul

Maybe the reason for this change is that people simply use faster computers, and have faster internet connections, than they did the last time the question was asked.

On a practical note, one of the disadvantages of plain text is that foreign language characters aren't supported - for example, if I was to set a story in Britain I might want to use the UK pound (money) sign, and it isn't part of the ASCII character set but is supported by HTML. Foreign names and words also often omit umlauts and other special accents that are possible in HTML

Re the appearance of so many unexpected line breaks in stories - I think that sending them by email causes the problem. Most text email programs insert hard line breaks if a line is over a certain length, even if it is pasted in without the breaks.

Well, first off, I'm sitting here shaking my head at myself.

Now I've got macros set up like Pam does--reformats a whole fic for me in seconds with a simple keystroke. (Hey, Pam, I've got the font changes and margin changes included in my macros. )

And after going through all that, and having gotten used to the way things have been... I'm actually thinking I should have voted to keep the text. :rolleyes: Not to mention there's old custom of using asterisks to *emphasize* words. It'd be a shame to lose that, no? Or am I just being an old fuddy-duddy? :p

Sara

I voted PlainText. I'm so horribly old school. I don't believe in HTML in email. Absolutely hate it. And not only can I code HTML with my eyse closed, I do it in WordPad (better than Notepad because it has the last 4 files in the File menu). I think the Archive is almost fine just the way it is. However, I don't print out stories. Until recently, I didn't have a printer at home, and I'm just used to reading it on the screen.

Word and RTF is much to be avoided, not only for the reasons listed above, but because it won't display in a web browser. The reason why the choice is TXT and HTML is that both will readily display in a web browser. The other two must be downloaded to the computer itself before it can be opened.

I think the original reason for the current line break format on the archive was screen size. If I remember correctly, the current width is 72 or 80 characters. Back in the day of text browsers, ya know, before all these fancy graphics you youngins are used to, that was as much that fit on the screen. Even with the advent of graphical browsers (which came along well before the Archive, but was still pretty darn fancy for the time), it looked just fine on a 640x480 resolution. It's a bit outdated today with these larger monitors and higher resolutions, but no one has ever brought up changing the line length. (Hey, look, another poll!)

Now that one is not bad at all – nice black and white. It seems I’ve seen some at Anne’s Place that were not nice black and white, though. I’d be okay with it as long as it stayed black and white. Any colors though can cause folks with vision problems to not be able to read it. Like for instance I saw a story from another sight not very long ago that I assume someone thought was a nice neutral color. The background was a light teal. I couldn’t read it. As long as you keep that in mind, it would be okay.
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I actually have to admit that this is usually easier with HTML – not always. Changing the margins with TXT usually doesn’t work for people who don't understand exactly what a macro is....
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Now you just need to tell me how to do that. Heck, I can’t even figure out how to do a color background with Word. (Not that I’d want to do that very often.)

Uhhh… Now you explained it, but can you put that in words I understand? (Non computerese? ) I'm still clueless....
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Not always so, Marcus. Lots of folks are using older computers, and are stuck with dial-up. Some places just don’t have faster connections available. If I lived 20 miles from where I do now, I’d be stuck with dial-up. Cable internet was not available where I live until about two years ago. Broadband was very limited and still is. If I lived in the next town, I wouldn’t have cable internet available. Until the last couple of weeks, I was working on a computer with 64 mb RAM and a 4 GB hard drive. It still works fine, and I’m sure lots of other people have computers even older than that. That computer was about eight years old. My cousin uses one older than that. I believe it might even still be running Windows 3.1. (Fortunately, I was finally able to get my newer computer fixed.) Ahh.. remember the days when hard drives were optional?

Ah, yes, I can see that as a problem. I recently wanted to post the word Russian in the Russian language – wouldn’t work, and that was on the boards.
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Must have been some little trick I picked up, because I no longer consider myself extremely computer savvy – too much stuff now. Now when we used Windows 3.1, I could do anything with it.
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I rather like the asterisks, too. I do hate reading entire parts of a fic when it’s in italics.

This is it for me in a nutshell. I hate the hard returns. I generally save fic to my computer and either print it out or transfer it to my eBook reader. Either way, chances are I'm going to change the layout of the page and the width of the paragraphs and end up with a bunch of paragraphs that look like this:

I hate having to search-and-replace all those hard returns, because inevitably they don't all get replaced properly, or things that shouldn't get replaced do, and the formatting is never quite right.

So if we could get rid of that, be it in html format or rtf or whatever, I'd be a happy campler. But obviously I'm not going to stop reading fic if we don't

I'm with you, Pam, on bookmarking all the double carriage returns, except I use zzzzz instead of your #####. I'll replace all the ^p^p with zzzzz, then replace all the ^p to just a space or nothing depending on if there is a trailing space or not. Then I replace all the zzzzz with ^p^p again. What all this does is retain the double carriage returns between paragraphs but filters out all the carriage returns within paragraphs.

I finally change the font to Times New Roman, which is optimal for Windows Mobile devices, straighten out the story header, copy one of the Steam pics as my cover page, save to Microsoft Reader format and copy the resulting file to my Windows Mobile phone. And I'm off to read a new fic!

Since you asked (and because my procrastination is getting out of hand), I made a little tutorial for reformatting archive fic. Perhaps later I can make a tutorial for making a macro, but this should do you for now.

Archive Fanfic Reformatting Tutorial

Let me know if anything still isn't clear!

Sara

Thanks, I'll check that out.

Cool tutorial, Sara!

And Pam and RL, I'm with you guys. I do the same thing too, but instead of #### or zzzzz, I use @@@@.

-- Lauren

I'm not sure that was the reason, Karen. Might have been, but I do recall at one point some years back a period when I had to fiddle around with the right margin for weeks on end to get it just right for a couple of readers who'd emailed that it was a problem for them. So it was possible, apparently, to make the right margin wider. It just was too wide for some readers and eventually it had to be shortened to what it is now. Which solved...whatever the problem was. It had, I think, something to do with printing the stories off. Maybe. Or I could be making this up as I go along....

Lauren? Do you remember what this was all about?

LabRat

My choice: HTML, because it offers more options and possibilities (along with CSS formatting).

What has always bothered me about the way, stories are archived in a plaintext way is the issue of linebreaks but also does it not allow any formatting of text at all. The archived stories vary from ~55 keys per line to over 70 and both values are too low for today's screen resolutions or too high for mobile devices.

On the other hand, having the stories archived in a HTML format is more challenging than one might believe at first. Color-themes and unfitting fonts are only one side of the problem. I've visited plenty of fiction archives that use some script software to aid authors and archivists in their work but more often than not, the sole benefits are for the creators and not readers. Because in the end, the way stories are displayed is marred by sidebars and other site features.

I'm rather fond of the story displays at fanfiction.net - because those can be directly imported from a word processor and therefore allow all formatting like bold/italics to be conserved.

Using HTML would also allow to comfortably modify your preferences, for example: if a HTML page is created on the fly by some script, you could save your preferences (background-color, font, font-size etc) in some cookie.

The filesize to download should not be an issue at all, because one can always modify the webserver to use compression or add some lines to a dynamic script. Then a 500kb story would only amount to (for example) 200kb anymore, despite using additional formatting.

LabRat, I'm not 100% sure myself, but I think we started out at 80 characters, then AOL readers complained it was cutting off at the margin. So we shortened the line length to 65 characters, and the complaining stopped. And so for consistency's sake, we've pretty much stayed at 65 characters.

-- Lauren