i'm confused what exactly are you doing?

Probably overdoing it by a wide margin. But I genuinely
want to find out if there's a bug with the idea.

Did you find anything wrong when you read the story?
(Apart perhaps from typos)

End objective: make this method so stone-simple my
dog could use it. But he'll have to get his own
account. :- )

i see, i haven't read your story to be honest ._.

Soooo basically, you're making a better way to read your stories... right? (?.=.?)

If I don't I might as well chuck FA into the garbage to
rot with the rest and forget
about fur writing.

(No insult intended to the good hard-working admins who slave
to keep the place running. Honest. :- ) )

If people can't read what you write without destroying their
eyes, then what's the point in writing it? FA is where the
readers are.

Although there is the sheer masochism....

Did you spot any problems?

With the way your previous writings look? Nah. Say, have you tried uploading .PDF?

FA doesn't support proper display of PDF files (so readers
can see it right on the screen). Having to dnld the PDF
kills reader interest in the story.

Negative good. But I will be posting PDFs later on. A reader
who likes the story enough to save it ought to have a clean
copy, not a .txt file.

I am not a big fan of single-column style writing. A loooooooooooooooooong line of tiny columns is no easier to read than massive wall o' text.

Just use standard paragraphs, and it will come out legible.

I agree: it looks like a newspaper column. That's
not always good on screen. A side-topic to be dealt with
elsewhere, but got it.

Did you find anything wrong with the way the paging
thing worked?

(Much wider columns there, you'll note; just about
right, actually)

The column thing struck me, too-- it looks very odd on my ridiculously wide resolution, but I'll admit that it's much more comfortable to read than a regular, full-width story could ever be on this screen. I'm still inclined to say it looks rather narrow, but that might just be me and my perspective.

In any case, I wandered around the paging a bit and it seemed to work pretty well; don't see what there is to break to it. A clever little trick! ~.~

Good twice over. If I'm going to hear a bug it'll be from
somebody on a non-Windows platform.

So far so good. One key to the column thing is the reader can
soom in to the text to read easier.

And not see half the text vanish off the right side of
the screen.

Ahem. *zoom* in.

I am not sure how it works. LOl.

Ultra-fast overview: break a story up into the right-sized
pages (I choose 1300 words). Page 1, 2, 3, etc. Then post
'em in Scraps, not Gallery. The first page goes in Gallery.

You know the URL for each page. From there you back into each
page and plug the right URL into the right 'button' at the
very bottom.

This was from DireWolf505. He had 'Previous | First | Next'
instead of page numbers.

Instead of one loooong document that falls off the screen and
onto the floor, you're chaining together a number of smaller
ones.

But to the reader it looks like a single document. And they
keep reading.

A bit more to it than that. And I *know* this idea's been
around on FA for one helluva long time. Why isn't it more
popular?

Hasn't been made easy. Or communicated well to the
writers who need it.

I see but my stories are note posted in the comments it has to be downloaded to a word program.

That's the other big key: when you submit, point FA to an
empty file to upload. Then cut-and-paste the page into the
comments/description box.

And when I realized what was going on (Ave, Panzergulo) I
let loose a mega-Doh that startled my cats.

You can dump a *huge* amount of text in there, and FA doesn't
even burp. Then you can edit it and plug in the URLS. Doh-de-
doh-doh...

Who was the first to discover this trick?

If I ever find out I'll kiss 'em through the modem.

well I never did it that way, making my viewers download the actual text so they can read it on their doc writer program just works for me so far.

Yup, and right here is where this thread could go careening
off track in a rousing ripping debate over 'download' vs.
'display. Safety helmets on, folks.

Or not. To try and steer it back tad, anybody know if
there's any polls or threads to tell us what the readers think?
How they see the pluses and minues?

Ferdamnsure a plus to dnlding is seeing black text on white
background like God and Gutenburg intended.

Above all else, what do readers think of 'paged' stories? (I'm
sooo not the only one to think of this.)

Well I will try display just to work this page view and let my viewers decide.

Uh.... No thanks?

Uh... No thanks to what? Rush Limbaugh? The gold standard? Neuticles for dogs?

Or rather, why no thanks? (I can't expect everybody on FA to swoon over this, y'know.)

Pagination in the sense you're doing, it cutting scenes apart willy-nilly to fit thousand-and-whatever word chunks, if anything, screws up your readers' experience. You are not reproducing holding a book in their hands, with neat chapters to take a break at. Getting it apart at scene breaks, sure, this would make sense, but not what you're doing. And I find that people tend to make more noise when I post a single complete work as a single complete work.

The real winners with largely separated out stories are the guys and gals writing serials, ultimately.

Going with an .rtf upload and FA-readable text in the comments is probably the best way to go.

I'll second Foozzz'zzzes opinion. Posting chapters as individual pieces in the comments seems (personally) to be the most logical and comfortable on-screen reading format. Chapter linkage in the manner you described above is also ideal, particularly when the <previous | next> link is repeated at the footer of each chapter -- many people only place it at the start of their texts.

Hiwever, I find the column formatting you use bawks my reading. While it might be logical for a zoomed-in reader, as you validly observe, the line breaks make my poor and infirm brain believe you're tabulating your text like poetry. It is quite alien to me and simply looks alien.

I look forward to viewing your upcoming experiment. Bravo in advance for trying something interesting. :)

I'll echo foozball's opinion and acknowledge yours. When we
see column-type text online it's usually enclosed within
borders. Our eyes get it.

Text that's open like this (or somewhat) can make reader brain
go Whuuu...? <insert Home Improvement sound FX here>. Is
this a 'first impressions' issue or is it something
that'll trip readers up every time? Dunno.

Yup, pagination like this makes the reader do what they have to
do at the bottom of each page of printed text: turn the page.
That takes a fraction of a second.

Here, it's a several second break. Troubling. But saw it
coming. Deliberately broke the text at specific paras. Point:
to make the reader more likely to think, 'hey, what comes
next? Better click and see.'

Deserves mention in the write-up.

Can't possibly reproduce a book reading experience on screen.
This mimics it a little, at best. To good result? To better
result than what we're putting up with? Better or worse than
dnlding an .rtf or PDF? Poll, poll, gotta do a poll...

For serial and chapter-based stories, yes, this thing is the
complete cat's meow. Saw it in use many times and working
well. Let's try it with a complete story.

Here we are. Appreciate the thoughts from both. Good ones.

Only thing that I wonder about, is the Favorite button. I Faved the first and like second one, will those all count?

Important question. A not-alert reader could get to the last
page and fave that out of habit.

Which can't possibly fave a story that might be forty pages
long.

Message must be inserted in spots: Fave the first page only.

See why I called a ton of (slightly puzzled) people in on this?

Makes sense to me.

Dude, word wrap! >.< Can you reformat this journal, it's awfully hard to read.

Okay, something tells me that's the point...? If so, bad start.

If I'm reading this right (and you didn't give ANY information in the journal itself, I had to read all the comments), you're talking about posting every scene/page as its own submission. Bad idea, straight up. Flooding tens, dozens, hundreds of pages for a single piece is going to take up front page space from other writers putting up one piece at a time and needlessly waste resources and time. Previous|First|Next is great for chaptered works, but I wouldn't want to have to keep hitting that link every time I get to the bottom of a page. Not to mention, not everyone has the same screen resolution as you, just think about that.

If I've misinterpreted what you're doing... Well, write a clearer journal next time, it's got me irritated.

We-ll, the journal was written to attract interest, not as a
dissertation on the whole technique. If it bored (or
irritated) little time blown, person passes by, and my
apologies for wasting your time.

Grant me that it's a lighting-fast read.

And you nailed my largest worry about this with an (irritated)
hammer: flooding. That's a bannable offence. Right?

Exactamundo. The writer who just wants attention and ego-
boost could abuse this idea up the ying-yang. And I wouldn't
doubt some have by posting ultra-short pieces and calling
them 'chapters.'

Then linking with 'Previous/First/Next. How clever.

So no surprise to me that you see this idea in a similar
light. Do I have a defence?

Sure. To do this responsibly, a writer ought to post the pages
at perhaps half-hour intervals.

Let's be frank: submit a new story or piece of art and it
stays in the Recent Stories list for maybe 5-10 minutes (I
timed one of mine). Then it's gone, pushed out by new subs.

The Recent Stories box has it's drawbacks as a tool to expose
users to new art or stories. But hey, it's better than nothing.

A half-hour 'submit rate' seems reasonably respectful of other
people to me. Or not so unrespectful as to justify a
ban. Your opinion?

A second defence: the indictment could stand if the
'pages' were in fact short (ie., what an 8x10 paper page
holds.) So how short is too short? I chose 1,300 words per
page for The Planning Meeting.

Having tested it out, that's too small. 2,500 words is
longer, but not too long. I think that's a good guess at
the average story size on FA.
Do you agree?

The point is not to put as many pages as possible up (if I were
unscuprulous) but the FEWEST
number of pages. 'Cause it
takes *work* to prep a page.
The reader should get a sizable
chunk of story to read before
they have to click for the next page.

But if the reader is able to read a long text without dying?
That's the only possible justification for this idea. It
strikes me as a powerful one.

Notice that the first page is in Gallery. The other pages are
in Scraps. Keeps things a little more neat 'n orderly.
For lack of proper folders on FA.

A further defence: let's say every writer on FA used this
idea and posted that 100K word Great Furry Novel they wrote
three years ago. What would happen?

Use to be a server room, now it's a mushroom cloud. Of course.

So exactly how many writers on FA have work of this magnitude?
That they'd like to post? FA is short story heaven for a
reason. Those who have longer work are somewhat blocked by
the diffculty of posting.

A 22K word story would calc out to about 9 pages. 1 in Gallery,
8 in scraps. This is the size of the story I'm posting
tomorrow, When The Moon Hits Your Eye. Too big? Your opinion?

True, this idea does consume more resources. FA now has 'em,
so I've read. Hell, it consumes *my* resources prepping pages.

But again, the reader gets to read long work. Right. On. FA.
Where they ought to be reading it, because dnlding a story--
short or long--is a deterrent to reading. Period.

If I'm going to write good fur fiction, yes I really do want
to put another obstacle before the reader. They probably had a
bitch of a time finding me in the first place.

If every writer did this, big trouble ahead. But few writers
on FA have really big work. Ergo, little trouble ahead.

Or I wouldn't be doing this. As I keep saying, your opinion? And I remain,


Discovering that I'm going to be on FA all day. Oops,

Fred Brown

Sigh. Typos and formatting errors. Unscuprulous?

It's gonna be a loooong day.

First journal I wrote was in 'wide column form a bit like
this here.

Then it displayed on the main page looking mangled.

Then switched to 'narrow' column. Now it looks good on
the main page, but weird otherwise.

Letting FA 'word wrap' the text murders the reader's eyes,
especially on big screens.

I'll take any solution you've got that doesn't involve animal
sacrifice.

But I won't say I won't think
about it.

I think that problem is all you. I have no difficulties getting things to post properly. Narrowing the column makes reading lengthy things like your reply up there harrowing. I honestly can't focus enough to finish going through it.

Then I could indeed have a problem, and it could be time
to rethink the column idea. Ballpark guess, responses are
running 3 to 1 in favour.

You may be in the minority. But I'm listening intensly to
people who don't like columns, and we're off topic.

It's not posting that's the problem, it's reading. I
*can't* put a (quite erotic) 22K word werewolf story on FA as-is.

I can't.

And posting as a .rtf or PDF is also right off, for reasons
that other people have argued about elsewhere. Poetigress
most eloquently.

Does this paging idea work, is it defensible, and do I need
another cup of coffee?

('Scuse me, lemme find a vein. Didn't get much sleep last
night)

But I'm not leaving the keyboard today. Gotta hear what
people think about this.

Seriously, whether or not I can stay on FA is at stake here.

And leaving is not an option. Your opinion?

I think it's good that people like you are trying to improve things here, let me get that clear.

I'm just of the mindset that there is no macguffin which will magically make people more likely to read stories. I already post my stuff in text, and with the inline reading function AND the implementation of BBCode in-text for formatting, I feel that's the best that can be done. No one reads it anyway.

Bottom line: people uninterested in reading furry fiction will remain uninterested, regardless of what we do. Sound, fury, and all that.

If there is a MacGuffin we'll know it from the magic wand up
it's ass. About what it would take. Well written there, and
sums it up neatly.

The trick I've got here isn't that MacGuffin by a long shot.
And it's hardly that new, notice I keep saying that, and
I'm expecting a few barbed comments re. pouring old wine
into new bottles.

But if it's not getting too airy-theory, one oblique payoff
to this could go beyond ease of reading.

A story that's a pain to read may still be enjoyable. The
same story that is easier to read is more enjoyable. By
some, anyway.

All readers see here on FA is hard-to-read stories (content
completely aside), or stories that are a minor pain to get at
(have to dnld).

So you can't very well blame people for feeling that the
writing here isn't of much value. Or worth reading. Every
time they read something they have a difficult time, a poor
experience.

And their eyes probably hurt after a while.

So will giving people a better reading experience affect how
much they value writing? Yes. How much? Some. Can you be more
precise? Sure, but I'll need waaay better coffee.

This is the fuzziest thing I've written so far today/tonight.
Does it show? Take that, and the blood/caffeine levels, into account.

This paging method should give readers a somewhat better
reading experience. And it could let longer work onto FA,
work that, by definition, is gonna be a *lot* meatier than
your average short story.

And also by definition, more valuable.

All theories must be subjected to intense experimental cannon
fire. Where's Panzergulo, he's the one who'sgood with tank
guns. Fire away.

And I remain,


Hallucinating. Juan? Juan Valdez? Is that you...? :- )

Fred Brown

I just don't think I agree with you.

Find me a way to have one submission that can be tackled page by page as via an e-reader, and you'll be on to something.

With the resources and skill I've got at the moment, this
paging concept is it. That said, the solution to a problem depends on what you think the problem really is.

The problem I'm trying to whup is a limited one. The goal: Get
a long story onto FA in a form that other people can read.

The key constraint: can't put more than 3-4K words of text on
a page.

The crucial requirement: the process can't be too labour
intensive, and ideally other people could do it too without
killing themselves.

Judged solely and only on these grounds the paging method
constitutes a solution. Notice that the goal rules out dnlding
the story.

Notice also a hidden constraint: there shall be no changes
to the codebase or how the servers work. Pretty easy
constraint to meet, you'll agree.

Oh yeah, one more hidden constraint: I need it *now*.
Can't wait for a six month development program to produce results.

Should I include a requirement that the text be displayed like
on an ereader? That what pops up when you click on a story
should behave that way?

No. That contradicts the don't-bug-the-server contraint. The
HTML page that comes back from the server is the HTML page
that comes back from the server. We can't change it.

But we can change what the server has to work with. Linked
documents? Server says that's kosher. Let's try it.

Or have I oversold this idea? Raised expectations a little
too high? Probably some. Mea culpa max. So long as I get to
use it, and the readers like it (enough).

And there actually could be a way to do page-by-page, and
make it look e-reader like. It's not highly practical, but
it's doable.

All we need is a widget that integrates into the browser.
The code is likely off-the-shelf too.

Right click on the download link, select 'View,' and the
widget grabs the file and throws it up either in another
browser window or as a pop-up. In that window are navigation
and zoom controls. Read to your hearts content.

There are perhaps 300,000 people on FA. A small group of
reasonably skilled Java coders might take a week to do this.
Very simple app.

Charge $5 per copy, it'll get pirated like mad, but you'll
still make a few bucks.

Do I offer this as an alternative to the paging idea?
No, for obvious reasons.

But until someone does it, this paging thing is the best we got.

Well... okay. For longer works, this would actually become a tremendous book-keeping nightmare. You'd have to go through and do this for every single page. So if you divide up a 110,000 word novel into bins of 1300 words, that means you'd have to go through and tabulate the links on every single one of those 85 separate submissions. I find it inconvenient enough to have to do this for chapters.
I guess I can see where you're coming from, but in the end, I think what will fix the readability issue on this site is for the coders to finally get off their asses and do something about it. I recall there was a thread on the forums at some point where some guy claiming he was the new admin representative for writers was going to make all these great changes based on our suggestions. Yeah... I haven't seen anything at all come out of that. At least, nothing obvious.
So maybe what you should be doing is to start complaining really loudly and frequently to the people in charge of the site. At the very least, I know there's a way to make .pdfs visible directly on the page, because I've seen it done on other sites. So this shouldn't be that big a problem.

That's most daunting thing about this trick, be it for
page or chapters or whatever. I said a good page size was 2,500
words. A 110K novel = 44 pages.

EEEK!! <WhumpaThump!!> <Mrrworr? Slurp!> (that's one of my cats
licking my face to wake me up)

For a really big project, maybe 3,500 words per can be tolerated.
32 pages. Wow, improvement.

Making this notion work, therefore, depends *totally* on
how fast and efficient the prep work is. And how much can be
automated with macros. And even if you did everything perfectly
it still it might take between 15-20 hours of work to get that
novel uploaded.

Notice, however, that a Scraps or Gallery page can display 24,
36, or 60 items. So it wouldn't be too unweildly once it was posted.

A key tactic that worked with Planning Meeting was go at it
in two steps, page by page. You're not 'tabulating' a bunch
of links. You post a few pages in order, then you go back and
edit and plug in the appropriate URLS to the next or
back 'buttons.'

(Recall the page of text is stuffed into the Description
box. Thankfully, FA will let you edit that. Or this trick
might be impossible)

You build the chain as you go. This might not be news to very
many people reading this. It does mean knowing how to play
with the FA interface and get the most out of it.

The more people who play Devil's advocate here the
better. Managing this properly: that's the nut to crack, not
the piddling little implementation technique.

Am I the first to really focus on this aspect? Out of
necessity? Doubt it. I sorta look on it as a programming
problem.

As for FA upgrading to be able to display text properly, we
just went beeyond my pay grade. For absolutely certain getting
.PDFs, for example, to show right would be what we
(ex-)coders call a non-trivial hack. The cost/benefit equations
likely came up 'Go Slow.'

Can't wait. So won't.

Well, okay. But if a 'page' is 3500 words long, I think (like what foozzz and Metassus were saying up yonder) it would make more artistic sense to do it by chapter. Which I have been doing with my novel (though not in scraps).

Hmmm. That thought takes me in an interesting direction. What
I have is a 22K word story that can't be 'chapterized.' One
long episode of action.

A fairly hard rule for a chapter is that it should be a
complete narrative block. The thing must close with some, er,
closure. Scene's over.

But FA is here with it's limits to displaying text. Your
chapter can't go over perhaps 4-5,000 words without the reader
feeling a little clubbed. Or at least intimdated.

This is the crucial problem with long text. The reader
groans at this huge page fulla words and is reluctant to wade
through it.

So because of how FA is built, any writer who wants to be read
must hobble their story inspiration to make each
chapter fit under the 4-5K cap.

Does the chapter want, or need, to go longer? Nope, can't do
it. A chapter has to fit on one web page.

This is an odd restriction for a site that has as one goal the
promotion of creativity in the 'Fur Arts.' It has shaped the
style and form of the stories that are told here.

It also guarantees that fur writers who work here will shy
away from long work. They won't get any experience with that
because they know what happens if a long chapter is posted.

<Chirrup-Chirrup>

(Can I make BBcode do sound FX? This'd be a good spot.)

I dunno. I'm may be reaching with this idea. But if it holds
coffee, I mean water then this paging concept looks positively
liberating. It clearly can let a writer break the 4-5K page
barrier.

Short stories are great, can pack a wonderful punch, and are
a staple here. Readers get off on them (sometimes literally).

But if a writer's gonna be a Writer, he or she can't stay
writing short stories forever. Has to move on to longer work
and grow.

Perhaps that just became a little more possible here on FA?

(Alternate hypothesis: Caffeine poisoning is setting in. Can't
be ruled out.)

I'm not sure I understand what you are asking about here. are you looking to have the story critiqued or so you want to know if the paging system works?

Doh. I should have said it up front.

No, critique of the story isn't important to me right now.
Finding a bug is. Even as simple as it seems.

Lot of different comps, OSs, and browsers out there. I'm
suspicious of a font-based bug, actually. Anybody running under
Windows'll likely be fine. Maybe.

One rule of software: simple can go up in a mushroom cloud
just as brilliantly as complex. With equal blast radius.

But if it works well? Hey...

Got a shout from Tybalt_Maxwell:

"I read the journal, but I don't quite understand
the discrepencies between your paged version and
a regular text. All I noticed was that the paragraphs
were unspaced and there was a link to your page as
a header.

and porn"

Then a second:

"To be more to the point: What exactly makes
your paging method different from anothers? I'll
admit I gave it but a cursory glance"


The difference? The paranoia of the dude who's doing it. I'm going
to start posting a large volume of writing that's very important to me
using a technique that only *seems* to work well?

The f***ing hell.

Good to say it again: this isn't really that different from the methods
already in use to connect chapters. There's a URL link or two at the
bottom of the thing. Click: new chapter. Or here, new page. Whoopee.
Where do we ship the Nobel medal?

But what *is* different is something important. People see a chapter,
fine, it's a chapter. They see the links at the bottom, fine, I can get
to the next chapter quickly. Thanx, Writer, for making my life a little
easier.

People buy it. 'Cause it is easier. And it encourages them to keep
reading. That's a huge plus if anybody hasn't noticed.

This, however, is being advertised up-front and in glowing neon as
*pages*. No choice involved. If you wanna see the rest of the
story you gotta click this link. Then wait for the next page to load.

People on FA are not used to reading stories this way. WILL they
read stories this way? Long ones, that is, that are worth their time?
Let's do an experiment and bug a buncha people, I mean politely ask
for some help, and find out. I've trapped you all in Brown's Literary
Test Pilot School, bwahahaha!!

Ahem. That said, there is the potential for real glitches. The first page
is in Gallery. The others are in Scraps. Links will be crossing a
'boundary' of sorts. Will the server permit this? No reason why
not.

Will I get my cute furry tail handed to me on a platter if I trust
*anything* about the FA environment? We'll all just let that Stupid
Question™ settle in for a moment. But then this is a wise question
for any software environment; I'm not singling out FA.

Just as example, there is a large vulnerability to this method, as I
see it. If for some reason the server misplaces page 22 of a 42 page
story, poof: the rest of the story is now inacessible to the reader.
The chain of links is broken. The reader may stop reading.

More important, even if the paging links work just fine, will a page
of text look the way it's supposed to when it hits the reader's
screen? The text is being dumped into the description field of
a submisson. The BBCode parser that munches through it will
do it's own funky thing to that text to display it.

The ultimate objective is text that's easier to read than the FA
standard. Has to be; a long story's got a bitch of a lot of it. And
a paging system looks to me like the only practical way to do this.

So what the reader gets should be consistently 'page-like' in look
and feel. It's not a chapter of mundane text, it's a page of a story.
This is the largest thing I'm waiting for: reports that the pages looked
odd (apart from what I wrote, that is)

There's a crucial formatting trick in play in The Planning Meeting,
and I'm waiting for somebody to notice it. I'm really waiting to hear if it
screwed up.

Now, it's reasonable to look at all this and shout, Hey, the Emperor has
no clothes and he has a cute butt (I'll take the compliment).

Somebody with the intials TM has come the closest to shouting it.
Not a problem. Gives me chance to explain some of the thinking
that's gone into this (a freakin' ton load). And maybe get some of
it straightened out the hard way. Welcome to FA, Mr. Brown, have fun.

That said, to read between the lines of Tybalt's shout, it did all look
pretty normal, nothing jumped out. The absence of evidence is
evidence. Might be doing something right here after all.

Oh, just one thing: WHAT was that about unspaced paras?

Seriously, Alert, Alert, red flags up the pole, Tybalt. Did the text
show up for you *without* a blank line between each para? If so, then
Houston, we have a Bug (Damn mutant cockroaches, must be the rad
levels in the Command Module).

Text displayed on screen seems to need that blank line or our eyes
start to have trouble after a while, we get tired. Somebody Google
why this is so, get back to me.

Altough I've got a fix for it. Tybalt, what kind of system are you working
with? And were there any strings of underlines or little blocks
(indicating undisplayable characters?

Lastly, thanx. Should be an easy fix, and you pointed me at it. Favours
owed. And I remain,


Getting some mileage from my first cup of coffee today; does it show? :- )

FB

This is vat I see

http://i712.photobucket.com/albums/.....g?t=1311529791

by "only link I see" I meant I saw that link only as the header for every page

the comments on your font, the subject matter, and the drawings were all completely necessary

ja

oh god damnit

The one I DL'd said "paged version" but then you upload the rest and they're what you described

BLUH

I see what you mean now, I think it's pretty cool! I might just use this method sometime in the future~~~~~~

Ahhhhhhh... the mystery is revealed (and I learn something helpful).

I didn't expect anybody to look at the file containing the
story. You did.

And I'm saving that screen cap you annotated. There just can't
be many writers out there who get *this* kind of feedback.
Great.

Times Roman font sucks? I'll think seriously about that. I
knoe a PDF version can do better.

It's how the story looks when it's set up as web pages that's
the important problem here. I'm betting that you're so used to
downloading stories you clicked automatically.

And didn't get around to trying to read the story on screen.

No problem. In fact, good. You've read the file. If you go
back and read the story as web pages, I'd like to hear how
they compare.

The link buttons are on the web pages, not the file.

I'll admit it: I was looking forward to pouncing on a bug.
That lovely tiny screaming and squishing sound... :- )

Thanx.

I just have a vendetta against any font that isn't century gothic, don't take it personal :P

Me again. I've been visiting over the weekend and watching your WIP as you toil. I was impressed with your efforts and the time and thought you have put into what you rightly state could be fixed forever by a bit of thoughtful coding.

Sadly, I still found your tabulation the greatest issue to legibility, as I found it almost impossible to scan comfortably, whether it be on a tablet, laptop or mobile. The forced line wrapping is awkward and uncomfortable -- and note that I offer this as my personal impression only. The effort I have to apply to read even your comments is disproportionate in comparison to those of other posters. I said before that it looks vaguely like poetry. It still does. How much thought and effort has to be applied to get the line wraps? How much time does it actually take? Not only is think'n'type, without the added horror of alignment and/or formatting, easier to perform, but it's is the more familiar way to read and scan information on a computer screen.

When I want to read a good story posted to FA, I either resize my browser for comfort -- giving me, the reader, control of the experience -- or I download the text file and read it off-site. Your experiment, noble as it is, raises questions about the provision of tools for writers on the site, and proves that the existing limited tech that we can call upon is deficient. Well done once more for bringing that subject to the fore.

Lastly, the "flood" issue is another matter that can annoy and inflame. I think it was Takewalker that brought it up, but as it will take too long to scroll up through the vertical morass above (seriously) I apologise if I am in error. I found that part-works are best when posted over a number of days, or weekly. It keeps up the interest from those who are interested and does not raise the ire of others who have posted one item that is lost in the deluge that hits the front page.

People vocally complain about it when it's artworks, and I can't see them not doing similar for text works. Perhaps I'm wrong, but when I get a large tranche of works from one person in my submissions list, I delete them all immediately on the simple precept that they have little value if they're being heaped onto the server like a wheelbarrowful of slush.

Be proud your efforts to make things better are making people respond and think! I commend you.

I'm really starting to enjoy what this thread is turning up.

I'm onto the flood issue. Maybe. It's more thorny than it looks. But didn't do damage
this time out (except for confusing the snot out of people).

What people saw was me flailing around making dumb mistakes, then catching 'em and fixing
'em. Learning curve.

More to come on flooding. There are several practical solutions. 'Piling on' on
people's submissions list can be easily avoided, even for large projects. Unavoidable,
the barks I'll get this time. Better next time.

One thing for dead certain: yes, if you've got, say, a 30 page structure to build (ie.,
30 subs), you *can't* create it all in one go. It must be done
in stages, and with some prep.

Hmmm, good idea. Lemme write that down in case I forget it. :- )

The formatting work on Moon? Actually trivial to do once I stopped making mistakes. But it
does produce that ragged right margin. That is an irritant in direct proportion to line
length. It may be a dealbreaker here, I'll give you the point.

If a column of text could be full justified, nobody would even blink. And they could read
it hyper-fast, even if it was bright pink text on yellow background.

I'm actually flexing what I (intimately) know about newspaper writing style and
typography. On screen is a *very* different thing than newsprint, truth. Many
rinciples still apply. Hypr-fast reading is the goal.

You're not getting paid to waste the reader's time. That damnwell applies here on FA.
The style encourages think *hard* 'n type.

What I'm facing is how to get a finished large work onto FA. To serialize it, the way the
system tends to encourage, is right off. Unless it *is* designed as a serial, you read
a large work more or less in one shot.

I keep saying this thing is stone-simple. So simple it's fiendishly complex. How about that?


Appreciate in depth reply. Mega-favours owed.


(PS: How's this reply read?)



, but it's intersting

Coffee's not working well today. Ignore trailing sentence there.

And it's *principles*, dammit, not rinciples.

That kind of paging technique works out if there is art that goes along with each page...rex knows someone who does that...

But I agree with Metasus...the forces tabs does throw me off on long things...comments it is cool, makes it have a tempo, and maybe if it was on a page rather than the computer it would be okay. Leaving that much screen space is phsiology hard for the human mind to process cause we are trained to read everything within the border. So it creates unnessecary strain...

Also, back to the page thing, I'm not sure if people would have the patience to keep clicking through. Although I'm doing something similar to 'Story from a Maserati' right now...tends to be what I write for the day and I post it...and they all follow the story line and are about 1-2 pages.

I could see this working for a webcomic. In theory. Key problem: how do you stuff an
image into the comments box?

Since that's where the BBcode parser will let you create a URL link to another sub.

As for getting thrown off, it's the ragged right edge thing. If BBCode had a 'full justify' tag
we'd be laughing.

As said before, an important goal was to allow the user to zoom in a few points without
the text hitting the right edge of the screen.

This may be less important than your point about the extra screen space. Just letting a
para wrap to fill the box would solve that.

Except that gets us back back to the Horrible Long Line problem (that I was assassin-
et on defeating here).

I'm mulling over a method to get near-full justified text. More on this as experiments
proceed ('I'll get some more brains, Marther.' 'No, no, Igor, we're not doing that this
week.' :- ) )

More than two-three pages and yeah, could be trouble if the story doesn't really hook the
reader. The stats for all 13 pages are *fascinating.*

(This method can tell a writer exactly where a story has problems, did anybody know that?)

WIP.

Ahem. Typo: assassin-set.

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2859278

Here, done like this. This guy posts a picture that has to do with each story page.

and yeah, it would be helpful for seeing where something went wrong, but at the same time, it could be very misleading. How would you measure it? by favs, comments, or pageviews?

Hmmm. I see it. Much shorter page, PREV/FIRST/LAST buttons, and because he's got art there
he's got the reader's attention.

And the size of the art you see depends on if you've got Full View turned on in your Profile.
Put the PREV/FIRST/LAST buttons at the very *top* of the text you dump into Comments and you
could do a webcomic. An FAcomic?

(Something I want to do, BTW).

Key observation: short page.

Tracking pageviews (and probably comments) could show you where some readers dropped
the story. Doing it right needs some more thinking. Could be stone-simple or labour-intensive.

Or will be stone-simple after I kill myself with the labour-intensive.

Still, an intresting side-effect. And only possible on FA, you'll note.

That is a keen concept, and I can see how that might come in handy for people with some ADD issues... cut it down to bite-sized snippets to help them stay on track. :)

It's not something I think I'd use, but decidedly helpful for those who want to organize things for convenience.

Got the problem right there. You got a book in hand, you read. You online in front of the same story...?

Not gonna be the same at all, is it? Soooo easy to get distracted (by all the cute fur porn just a click away :- ) )

Trying to figure out the right size for a page (to help people keep reading) is driving me nuts.

When The Moon Hits Your Eye (it's up in the Gallery) is 29K words and 13 pages. Around 2,200 words per page. Too long? Too short?

Working it.

Gotta do it. It's the only way I can put really long stories on FA so people can read it on FA.

I thought the columns have improved somewhat from the first test. ^^ Keep at it!

Lines are a little longer by about 1/2 an inch. Might be close to right if I can full-
justify the text.

The target is a line length so the reader doesn't have to move their eyes [much] to read the
whole line.

Except there's all that white space to the right that attracts the eye.

This is a little more of a bitch than I thought, hmmm?

You'll figure it out, we have faith. ^^

Yea, brethren and sisters, that's what we're pushing here in the Church of
Brown: Faith and Yiff.

Please turn to page 4 in your order of service and we will all drool over
the sacred image of Champagne.

(Quick, quick, pass the collection plate before they stop drooling. :- ) )






The coffee's especially good this AM. 'Nuff said.

....... You seem intellectual ........

It's a curse, a curse, I tell you!! Alla time typing too fast and burning up keyboards.
Devouring Scientific American like other people read the funnies. And fitting my big
head through the damn door? OW!!

When, when will the horror ever end??!!






(But at least I got a sense of humour. :- ) )

Sounds like a positive review. Thanx. The real irony is the damage all this is doing to my eyeballs.

But think I've got it mostly worked. Next one will be much easier and faster. Write-up is in progress.

Some shorter work is coming, at worst 2-3 pages. Stay tuned.