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I read a comment at the end of Leigh Anne - Chapter 11 that said this chapter needed to be reformatted so that the reader could read it either on Internet Explorer or Firefox. I don't use any of these. I use Google Chrome. Now after looking at this chapter I find it has been reformatted. I know this because the lines are shorter. I am sorry if I offend anyone, but, I write like I do for a reason, which to date, nobody has said they finally figured it out. Okay, this blog is for the purpose of telling the admins here to please not reformat my chapters, because the shorter lines make it very difficult for me to re-read my chapter to see what the commenter is saying, which I do with every comment that has a criticism on my work.
So, just so everybody knows, my chapters are perfectly formatted for Google Chrome.
Love & hugs,
Barbara
Comments
Web formatting
If you are publishing for the web you ought not to be formatting your text for any particular browser. HTML is specifically designed to flow into the screen estate the reader owns and uses, using the fonts available to her or him.
You should definitely not make assumptions about the way the reader will see your offerings. You have no clue if they are reading on a 22" widescreen monitor at 1920x1280 (as I am now) using Firefox under Debian Linux, Windows through a CRT running 1024x768, an iMac, a TV, a laptop with a 3:4 display ratio, a tablet, a phone or an eReader. You also have no clue what fonts are available to them or what language they normally speak, or even if they have access difficulties and are using large screen or high contrast fonts. There is a reason it is called the World Wide Web.
The best way to post stuff to BCTS is to open your HTML file and strip out everything except paragraph and emphasis markers. The site Drupal will remove much of the excess anyway. Don't use specific fonts or mandate line widths, it just puts readers off.
Don't worry about losing your formatting. A reader cares more about the words you use than the way you present them. If you want full control over your output then use PDF, which is designed for the printed page, and go to a publisher to have your story printed the traditional way.
Penny
Far as we can tell...
...the only person who has modified that particular story is you, which you did minutes after originally posting. Revision history doesn't show anyone else making changes.
But aside from that, administration here CANNOT agree not to reformat stories. Heck, we do it all the time because LOTS of people cannot write HTML that doesn't break the site. I probably reformat one or two stories a day, not all of them new ones and the other admins and editors may average a little less than that all added together.
But complaining about formatting in a story is NOT something that should go in a comment, that should be made in a PM (to author, preferably) or not at all. The person who made that complaint should see Rule One.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Just as a hint...
...one of the easiest ways to break the site is to attempt to use CSS formatting commands through brute force. BC actually uses CSS for its own internal formatting, and CSS is notoriously difficult to "nest" safely because of arcane "inheritance" rules, not to mention the fact that many browsers aren't particularly rigourous about obeying the CSS standard as propagated by the World Wide Web Consortium.
I too have looked at Leigh Anne chapter 11, and I can see why someone may have been *tempted* to re-edit to remove formatting errors, but as Erin commented, no one actually did so. Every edit of every file leaves "fingerprints" that are clearly visible, at least to staff, even if the author of the revision doesn't bother to fill in the little comment field on the editing page with an explicit reason for the change.
It's entirely possible, though, for pseudo-changes to appear because the story was incorrectly formatted *for BC* to begin with, although these sorts of things are completely invisible when viewed directly from the source in a standard HTML Web browser.
BC doesn't actually enforce entirely strict HTML standards, because many of our authors are not HTML mavens, and shouldn't be expected to become "geeks" when they'd rather be "poets."
One of the primary departures from Web standards made by BC is that BC pays attention to linefeeds (or carriage returns, however one likes to think about them) so that authors accustomed to posting on BBS systems, where linefeeds are the primary method of indicating line length and "formatting" the story, can post with no problems. People who don't know about this strange behaviour, which is a compromise in usability which hopefully encompasses a very large number of authors who would otherwise be prevented from posting stories as they typically appear on sites like Fictionmania, for example, which performs automatic reformatting to generate pseudo-HTML files, sometimes very badly.
More sophisticated users can be fooled by this behaviour, but are probably in a better situation to cope with it, as far as understanding and compensating for it, at least.
I suspect that this is what happened to chapter 11, since there are, in fact, a very few formatting errors which would cause... anomalies on BC.
I have a lovely blog on the subject, or you can PM me for a slightly lengthier explanation, but please rest assured that no such errors were introduced by any "intruder."
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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
strange format
I went and looked at chapters 8 - 11 using both firefox and chrome. Chapters 8 - 10 behaved as expected in both browsers. Narrow the window and text wraps smaller, widen the window and the lines stretch out.
Chapter 11 is formatted to a fixed length. Narrow the window and the text on the right side of the screen disappears, widen the screen and the right half of the window is empty. Each line ends with the /br tag (hard line break). This is different from previous chapters. If you mean this - carry on. If not maybe Erin or the elves can help find and fix the problem.
Formatting
An author can choose to format their story to make is as pretty or as ugly as they wish so long as it doesn't break the site.
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You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your family.
"Fixed Width"
It's actually fairly easy to impose a pseudo-fixed-width format, since the site display engine doesn't properly break long sequences of certain characters.
The common, but ill-advised, "trick" of creating lengthy sequences of hyphens or other characters to imitate a horizontal line actually forces the user to scroll back and forth horizontally if their screen, or font size, is set to anything other than what the author *believes* is reasonable. which is almost guaranteed to cause many readers to back out of the story immediately, and annoy the rest.
In short, lengthy sequences of characters uninterrupted by spaces should *never* be used, and in these days of using "smartphones" as browsers, "lengthy" can be as little as seven to ten characters, depending on the typical character length of the words one uses.
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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