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Thank you to the eleven lovely people who answered my question on formatting fics for uploading last week.
A rough analysis shows that:
For file uploading (FA etc)
4 of you submit in word format;
1 of you submits word-generated html;
1 of you uses Notetab (which I'd never heard of - sounds like a more straightforward way to get paragraph tags than Word offers);
1 of you adds formatting tags while writing, saves in txt format and edits to html;
1 of you writes in Word, saves as txt and then puts in formatting tags.
For LJ (and other places that let you copy-and-paste into text boxes)
3 of you copy-and-paste to LJ and then add formatting tags;
3 of you add formatting tags to Word document and then copy-and-paste to LJ;
1 of you adds in formatting tags to the Word document as you write, and the copy-and-paste to LJ.
I can certainly see the benefit of cut-and-paste - I just don't tend to think of it first because I started off on FA and became conditioned to file uploading.
However, uploading Word files doesn't work for me: I found it tended to run words together likthis, and also FA's conversion doesn't distinguish between paragraphs and linebreaks. For a lot of fics that's irrelevant, but for stories such as Invictus in which 'vertical formatting' play a crucial role in establishing mood, it's essential.
I seem to have been overly reluctant to code manually, compared to most of you. After several months of LJ I find the tags come a lot more naturally than they used to - but I can't see an ideal solution to this. If I go back and add formatting later, I'm afraid I'll miss something (I do code drabbles manually, but for a 10,000 word chapter in which I'm using a lot of italics to separate different thoughts, I'm more likely to miss something). But if I add tags as I go along, I can't see the effect of the italics clearly.
Basically, it seems that I need a html version for FA (and now LJ - see previous post - yay!), and a text-with-formatting-but-no-p-marks version for cutting and pasting to Skyehawke and Toujours Pur. The latter I can get from the former by just stripping the p and hr tags, I guess, so I'm back to my first thought of whether it's quicker to clean up word-generated html or to add the i tags manually. Next time I might try using Word's format search to find all the italics, then add in _ marks, and paste into Dreamweaver (which I hope would give me the paragraph tags I need for the html file) and use that to add the actual formatting.
A rough analysis shows that:
For file uploading (FA etc)
4 of you submit in word format;
1 of you submits word-generated html;
1 of you uses Notetab (which I'd never heard of - sounds like a more straightforward way to get paragraph tags than Word offers);
1 of you adds formatting tags while writing, saves in txt format and edits to html;
1 of you writes in Word, saves as txt and then puts in formatting tags.
For LJ (and other places that let you copy-and-paste into text boxes)
3 of you copy-and-paste to LJ and then add formatting tags;
3 of you add formatting tags to Word document and then copy-and-paste to LJ;
1 of you adds in formatting tags to the Word document as you write, and the copy-and-paste to LJ.
I can certainly see the benefit of cut-and-paste - I just don't tend to think of it first because I started off on FA and became conditioned to file uploading.
However, uploading Word files doesn't work for me: I found it tended to run words together likthis, and also FA's conversion doesn't distinguish between paragraphs and linebreaks. For a lot of fics that's irrelevant, but for stories such as Invictus in which 'vertical formatting' play a crucial role in establishing mood, it's essential.
I seem to have been overly reluctant to code manually, compared to most of you. After several months of LJ I find the tags come a lot more naturally than they used to - but I can't see an ideal solution to this. If I go back and add formatting later, I'm afraid I'll miss something (I do code drabbles manually, but for a 10,000 word chapter in which I'm using a lot of italics to separate different thoughts, I'm more likely to miss something). But if I add tags as I go along, I can't see the effect of the italics clearly.
Basically, it seems that I need a html version for FA (and now LJ - see previous post - yay!), and a text-with-formatting-but-no-p-marks version for cutting and pasting to Skyehawke and Toujours Pur. The latter I can get from the former by just stripping the p and hr tags, I guess, so I'm back to my first thought of whether it's quicker to clean up word-generated html or to add the i tags manually. Next time I might try using Word's format search to find all the italics, then add in _ marks, and paste into Dreamweaver (which I hope would give me the paragraph tags I need for the html file) and use that to add the actual formatting.
