One of the greatest annoyances of writing for the web is the fact that the text is formatted unlike how you intended it to be read. On word processors, you have margins that simulate a standard piece of paper. This makes the author (hopefully) write paragraphs that are of decent, nice length.

When posted online, the paragraphs are stretched out, making what was formerly four or five lines become two lines, making it seem like the author is pressing the 'Enter' button too much.

Basically, publishing to the web turns what looks nice (and what authors intend):

[Click the Thumbnails]



to:




The problem becomes worse when the window is maximized to fit a wide monitor. Newspapers account for this by splitting the page into columns, making the text easier to read. Schnoogle caps the width to some extent as well.

You can't simply make paragraphs longer, because artificially inflating paragraphs to suit a view doesn't change the fact that the paragraphs are too long.

Perhaps you can impose this restriction on formatting by bringing the margins in? It would be set to the size of standard paper, making what was written on the word processor look the same online.

It would be ideal if it was an option for the author (the stories would then be formatted in that manner by default), giving him/her the ability to portray the story the way it was meant to be read. Additionally, it could have an option near the current formatting box to disable the new formatting if the reader wishes it.

Any thoughts?

 

Have this been changed? I now get this when I try to read a story;

I find it kinda annoying..
Or is it just me?

 

If you want to read, don't use the dev site. It's there for, you know...development?

 

Not sure if you were aware, but the site has done this twice so far. At first I saw it during DarthBill's fic and reloaded the page, but it did not fix itself.

The second time it was with Era of Hogwarts. I simply assumed that it was because your story was uploaded before the feature got added, but then I remembered that it had already happened once.

So I screened and thought you should know, if you didn't already.

Not sure if it's my browser, or if it is merely a bug on the site.

 

Sorry, it was not meant as whine, just thought you should know about it.

 

It looks like it's working fine on dev.pc.net.

Just a suggestion though; could you remplace the 'page' border
(currently:

) with a 1px width light grey/blue solid line (or dotted or even dashed would be fine)?

It would fit better with the current theme and it'd reduce the number of pictures the browser has to load.

 

Raven, I don't know how you have it on your local computer, but I took a look at the current setPaper code and had a thought.

Would it be better to use something like wrap() to surround your story text with a parent <div> that can have the left page border as background while the original #storytext can have right border as the background? This could then allow, when you have the time, to make the page size draggable, instead of fixing it at 720px or whatever you have it at now.

I don't know if you've considered this already, or if it will work, but it's just a thought.

 

I have no idea what that means, but having a draggable page size sounds good. Though it might harm loading times I guess.