Fanfics in the Web 1.5 - Formatting and Presentation, and a regression

[Venia Silente]

Last fic I wrote (not here, but I'll get to the why) brought up an issue that I had noticed for a couple of years across fanfic communities but that I had never been able to properly put into words until a relatively recent conversation with @bobandbill but I guess I've waited it out too long.

The net is vast and infinite and one of its purposes is showing information in ways we can understand it. When it comes to writing, for example, much of the net copies and improves upon the world of typesetting and presentation that we see in magazines and newspapers, with an amount of formatting options for text that give it semantic meaning: headers, italics, underlines, bolding, capitals, quoteblocks, Comic Sans, you name it. An important number of those have even become tags in the HTML specification or attributes in CSS, ever since the 90s pointing towards a standardized means of showing web pages.

Yet... when it comes to publishing fanfics in places like Serebii and other web platforms while some (some) of the basic options are there.... much of the rest isn't, and there is no parity between the formatting options of site A and site B. Sites based around ye olde BBCode implement tags such as [B ], [I ], etc for presentation but besides the basic ones in the spec support is notoriously limited and each site does their own thing. And I'm mostly wondering why (in 2018) and what for (on the internet).

Serebii itself for example supports strike-through and colour and font except for a small gotcha. There's support for some visual separation of sections (via [HR ]) but not the associated semantic separation such as header [H 1...5] tags or <a> anchors. PokéCommunity supports anchors, plus near-full classing and styling of sections and spans to the point it is possible to integrate the presentation of a post with the theme the reader is currently using to view the site. Then comes stuff like AO3 which is kinda famous for greatly improving over Fanfiction.net's basic and often joked-about support by basically giving you the keys to the pearly gates in case you want to use them. Paper-styling, drop capitals, semantic and stylized quoting, columns, a lot of stuff is there (but you have to ornament things yourself).

Basically in these more modern sites you can publish stuff that would read like media from the 1980s, whereas everywhere else seems to be stuck in the presentation from the early 1970s if not earlier.

I'm wondering however in your experience as writers and readers: when it comes to presentation and meaning of your content, how much is too much and at the same time how little is too little? If I wanted to post only text I'd just go to eg.: pastebin or similar sites; at the same time, I'd feel strongly we do not want to end up back in the Geocities Hell of the late 90s (some of you might remember...) with colourful waterfalls of text, bouncing mouse cursors and the glorious <BLINK> and <MARQUEE> tags. Still it's 2018 and I'd hope that if my fic is a literary work then it'd be able to... dunno... look more like it is one?

I personally have been wanting more to do with the potential itself - turning past from the simple notepad.exe style of ASCII-only, No Items, No Bolding, Final Destination fanfiction to somewhat more modern but still 1970s-esque hyperfiction - with links, texts given meaning, a certain degree of immersion in quotes, different kinds of speech (telepathic, emphatic, digital, voiceover, Pokémon magic-conversion-across-languages-that-is-not-necessarily-telepathy, etc) represented with different punctuation or typeface, etc. Basically a more "rich text" model of writing. That's what hit e when publishing Beyond Today where one of the things I want to keep was PMD Dialga's ALLCAPS style (reminder: ALL CAPS IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL), except LONG STRETCHES OF ALLCAPS TEXTS QUICKLY BECOMES TIRING AND BORING AND RUINS THE READABILITY AND PRESENTATION OF THE STORY. (Yes, that was intentional. ) Now, in printing or in mediums like Pokécommunity and AO3 it's importing from my LibreOffice doc since I'm using font-variant: small-caps; and both sites will respect that with a simple search-and-replace. DeviantArt only requires some more work last I checked. But for most if not other sites, behaviour changes wildly: my attempt at importing in Serebii's editor resulted in not only the all-caps formatting being lost but also the tags being lost as well, so if I wanted to export I'd have to reprocess the entire fic by hand. Certainly not worth it if I have to multiply by N sites, or by M other formattings I want to adapt or somehow poor-mans-version into something that is more pure text. Oh and don't get me into what happened when I tried to import into ff.net. We don't talk about that in civilized lands.

So basically launching a discussion in general terms: What do you all think of going for a more rich style of publishing on the web? Would it have to be limited to eg.: sites like AO3 or is it feasible to do in Serebii? What does that mean in a community like Serebii where linking to the "real", richer, official version of a work is forbidden by the rules? Would Serebii readers have to content themselves with the "poor man's" version of the writing that also addled with the extra cost that it means for the publisher? Finally, where most other forms of fanwork evolve (even romhacks, going from G3 bases to G4), should fanwriting remain the same? And considering the option of publishing Beyond Today here somehow, what would you think I should do in the case of Dialga's dialogue where I want to preserve the styling -and the semantics that come with it- of DIALGA speaking in ALLCAPS but I do not want to tire the reader? What about future stories?

 

[Dragonfree]

To me, the actual text of the story plus basic semantic formatting is generally what's important. Unless you're doing something highly esoteric, you shouldn't need particularly fancy formatting to get a story across. It's true some mediums restrict even relatively commonplace formatting (FanFiction.Net is terrible with all unusual formatting, and footnotes don't work on forums), and that's too bad. But for the vast majority of cases, just bold and italics and maybe font changes will do fine, and I don't think drop capitals or whatever should be anything more than optional aesthetic flourishes for 99.999% of all fiction. If you are doing something highly esoteric involving intricate specific formatting, then it's probably best off as its own website formatted precisely to your intentions, but that's an extremely tiny minority of writers.

Your small-caps case is annoying but still solvable - you can use Unicode small caps, or if you can be bothered, simply change the font size of the non-capitals - you could probably write a script to insert the font size tags. Like so:

LONG STRETCHES OF ALLCAPS TEXTS QUICKLY BECOMES TIRING AND BORING AND RUINS THE READABILITY AND PRESENTATION OF THE STORY

 

[bobandbill]

Huh, that's neat that there is a decent way to format all caps like that. Good to know!

I have only ever used minor formatting; so bold/font sizes (usually for chapter titles but a couple exceptions), italics, the odd bit of centred text, and once a different font colour. I have used a bit of capslock at times too.

I suppose what would be a niche yet useful thing would be a tool that takes in your text, formatting and all, and spits out a version that'll show up nicely on a forum or site of choice. Might be a bit tedious to create though, especially as capabilities of sites (what can be posted) evolve. We moved from vB this year after all!

 

[Phoenixsong]

I suppose what would be a niche yet useful thing would be a tool that takes in your text, formatting and all, and spits out a version that'll show up nicely on a forum or site of choice. Might be a bit tedious to create though, especially as capabilities of sites (what can be posted) evolve. We moved from vB this year after all!

I use Pandoc (it is a command-line tool, but it's very easy to use). I write in Markdown and then can convert it to whatever else I happen to need (DOC, HTML, idk PDF or something, etc.). It doesn't support any sort of BBCode output by default, but I found a custom writer someone had created for some other forum software and tweaked it to output to vBulletin's BBcode format. S'pose now I'll have to compare XenForo's BBcode to vB's and maybe make some more adjustments, although the basic BBcode that like 99% of fics can get by with should be universal, so I doubt it'd need much. If anyone else is interested, I'd be happy to share the custom writers when I get around to those tweaks.

 

[bobandbill]

I use Pandoc (it is a command-line tool, but it's very easy to use). I write in Markdown and then can convert it to whatever else I happen to need (DOC, HTML, idk PDF or something, etc.). It doesn't support any sort of BBCode output by default, but I found a custom writer someone had created for some other forum software and tweaked it to output to vBulletin's BBcode format. S'pose now I'll have to compare XenForo's BBcode to vB's and maybe make some more adjustments, although the basic BBcode that like 99% of fics can get by with should be universal, so I doubt it'd need much. If anyone else is interested, I'd be happy to share the custom writers when I get around to those tweaks.

This is quite cool! I'd like to see those custom writers you mentioned, and perhaps add a link to them in the Author Cafe rules thread given it has a bunch of links to useful threads already.

 

[Venia Silente]

It's true some mediums restrict even relatively commonplace formatting (FanFiction.Net is terrible with all unusual formatting, and footnotes don't work on forums),

FF.net truly is a special case. It's one of the few sites that I know that has issues with the usual "2 enters between paragraphs" rule. Also, fun story: before 2014 long dashes (such as em dash and en dash) didn't work correctly in FF.net. It seems their parses is overgreedy when it comes to eating up "unlikable" things without checking if the end result is still "likable".

If you are doing something highly esoteric involving intricate specific formatting, then it's probably best off as its own website formatted precisely to your intentions, but that's an extremely tiny minority of writers.

Your small-caps case is annoying but still solvable - you can use Unicode small caps, or if you can be bothered, simply change the font size of the non-capitals - you could probably write a script to insert the font size tags. Like so:

Man I can't believe I forgot ye olde Unicode small caps. They are pretty good for some technical documentation actually. Could work with those, since converting them programatically is one order of magnitude easier than de-tagging and re-tagging formatted text. I'll certainly be giving it a look for a first attempt at a release.

As for using a website formatted to my intentions that is in the thoughts for the future, since I could (and did before) publish archives of the stories in PDF, but I was looking at a more interactuable solution. I know at least one person here in the site planning on a system like that.

As for what I'm doing... what I'm doing is really not anything "highly esoteric". I mean, as I've said before, I have been seeing all-caps and capitals since about 1640. It's really I'm impressed, or rather anti-impressed, that the default / common denominator for web systems like forums is such incredibly low.

I use Pandoc (it is a command-line tool, but it's very easy to use). I write in Markdown and then can convert it to whatever else I happen to need (DOC, HTML, idk PDF or something, etc.). It doesn't support any sort of BBCode output by default, but I found a custom writer someone had created for some other forum software and tweaked it to output to vBulletin's BBcode format.

That's basically the same I did with LibreOffice's HTML export. Since it outputs highly-formatted HTML5-esque content, I just tossed a couple of regexes (yeah, I know) at it to convert it to both clean AO3 HTML and to rich text BBCode. In theory I'd have to write ~N more transforms for different sites. In theory it'd also be smarter to just code the transformations in XLST and serialize that, it could be useful for publication. Still, am interested in seeing what do you with Pandoc with those custom writers.