I've noticed that different stories appear differently on my cellphone. Just for the record: I have an LG Quantum (just released with Windows Mobile 7). I'll use two examples that are currently on the BC front page: "A Fortuitous Adventure: or, how I got my first job" by Louise Anne and "The Experiment: Part 10" by Donjo. Please note, I'm not singling out these two stories for any reason other than I looked at them on my smartphone.
The first story, "A Fortuitous Adventure" would not format to a reasonable size for displaying on my smartphone, even when I turned it horizontally the story was over twice as wide as the phone screen. By the time I pinched the screen small enough to display without having to swipe from side to side the font was way too small to see much less read.
The second story, "The Experiment" displays just fine on my screen even when I hold it vertically, and in a font size that is easily readable.
I have no idea what the difference is between the two. I can choose to display either a mobile format or a desktop format, but neither choice gave me a readable presentation of the first story.
Wassup?
Comments
Text editor
If your smartphone has a text editor, cut and past then turn on word wrap.
Not sure if th "Printer Friendly Version" is plain text, someone else can elaborate?
Sorry, its a workaround, not a fix.
I suspect, without proof...
...that it's due to the picture, which is 218 pixels wide and has text "floated" next to it. Does your phone have an option to avoid downloading pictures? I assume you're browsing off the web. If not, you can copy the text and paste it into a file, and then just load it on your phone as a file.
I also suspect the cellphone software, because the "printer friendly" version, at least, can be compressed horizontally until the floated text is very skinny indeed, about five to six words wide before it encounters an incompressible screen object when using Firefox.
The Printer-friendly version doesn't filter out pictures, unfortunately, just the surrounding site "furniture."
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Must be the picture
I tried the printer-friendly version, but still no joy. And I've found nothing to turn off the picture downloading so far, but the intrepid developers always find ways to hide things so it may be there somewhere. Stupid manual is a pdf file, which makes it harder to thumb through to find things, at least for me anyway.
The second chapter of the story which was posted today displays fine, but it appears the text next to the picture has been done differently.
The copy and paste functions differently in the WM7 environment, no joy there so far. I bought a WM7 phone because they seem to be the only ones that give a Word-type function where I can read doc files and such. I like to save some stories off and transfer them to the phone for leisurely reading, but I have to do this on my home pc. My previous phone, a Samsung slider, had no equivalent to Word I could use for this purpose.
And to the person who suggested Opera, that was the default browser on the Samsung and I liked it, but so far the people who make Opera have not come out with a version for WM7. Same with the people who made the ebook reader I used and liked - Mobipocket. As anybody familiar with Micro$oft would expect, there is no backwards compatibility with apps written for WM6.1. :(
. . . .
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until they speak.
I went outside once. The graphics weren' that great.
I just use 'printer
I just use 'printer friendly', and turn my phone sideways. That seems to be the easiest to use on my Android.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
not sure it is available
but you might give opera mobile a try. It displayed the stories fine on my Blackberry with mobile view turned on. Just a suggestion,though. I just wish I could make it the default browser for my Bold. Saving up for the Torch; WANT!
Hugs
Diana
cell phone browsers work differently
or at least they used to. Basically, computer browsers use a markup language called HTML, with which most of us are at least marginally proficient. Before the large screen smartphones came the smaller format internet capable phones, so different standards were adopted to better accommodate the smaller format. WML is basically a subset of HTML, with a couple of specialized tags thrown in to better handle the touchscreen style of interfaces on phones.
I am guessing here but if an author puts in some HTML markup in their story to improve readability or say, flow around a picture, and the markup is not a part of WML, perhaps your phone is going wonky over it.
I have a Droid, and it handles things well for the most part, but I run into the odd website all the time that just will not work correctly. It can be a bit frustrating, but remember that we live in an era of continual emerging technology.
Hugs
Carla Ann
WML
"Wireless Markup Language" is *available* for Web designers, but very few sites are coded in it, because it's tons of extra work. Some of the largest sites go to this trouble because marketing analyses have led them to the belief that it's worthwhile, but they're the exception rather than the rule.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Yup
As well, some of them that USE WML on their sites, I wish they wouldn't. They cripple the results into something that's only useful if you ONLY want the first thing on their site. I'd rather scroll around.
(Home Depot and Lowes do this - you can't even override their mobile site without reprogramming your phone's browser identification)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.