Story authors

Apologies if this has already been addressed in another thread or elsewhere on the site (if so, feel free to direct me to the right place), but is there any way to add basic formatting to text when drafting a story?

I don't need anything fancy, but I can't live without at least bold and italics. Block indenting would be nice, too.

UBB code used to work on the "old" site but doesn't seem to function anymore.

Welcome to my world.

Is there any way to add basic formatting in the Stories section of FF?: No.



A subset of UBB code still works in many areas of the site, including here in the forums. color! italics! bold! Inexplicably, it does not work in the Stories section.

I refer you to my extremely long 2 year old multi-post (the following is a hyperlink even if it doesn’t look like one) Fatlovesex story online publishing on ff and other sites: a comparative study wherein i compare and contrast 4 sites in our community which host stories plus my own custom-made purpose-made site for my own stories, where i can do whatever i want with formatting.

Most information in that 2 year old post remains correct (i just re-read it), other than the character count here on FF has been doubled from 10,000 to 20,000—Yay!—and DeviantArt does have a character limit, though it’s quite high.

Since writing that post i’ve learned to loathe DeviantArt, as for me at least i have to manually format Every. Single. Line. in terms of line spacing and fancy section breaks. Asked them and they have no API for submitting pre-formatted stories in any file format. DA also lacks any concept of between-chapter/“deviation” navigation.

Here’s a shorter-but-not-short summary post i made. It too is a hyperlink, even if it doesn’t look like one. Yes, i have a feature request in for making all hyperlinks visible without needing to hover over them.

It continues to blow my mind that FF expects its Stories section to remain relevant in the 2020s when it’s stuck with 1990s dialup online *emphasis* and _strong emphasis_, or as i do it, **strong emphasis** “formatting”. (I use the asterisks because they cascade nicely for ***strong bold italic equivalent emphasis***.)

All i can tell you is that this site runs on custom software made by the site owner, who last i checked remains the only technical site maintainer (by design and choice if i understand correctly). There’s a lot of To Dos, and as important as this formatting is to you, me, and some other authors and likely readers here, it may not be on the same level with keeping malefactors out and ensuring site stability.

Let’s keep politely lobbying for it and remain clear on what we want, and hopefully we’ll make it into at least the 2000s in terms of formatting if not the 2010s or 2020s sooner than later.

Thanks very much for the reply!

I guess I will have to resign myself to asterisks to indicate emphasis for the time being. But I don't have to like it!

Something else I'm not too fond of is automatic chapter numbering. That would be fine if there weren't a character limit, but back when I first started posting my stories here, the character limit was still 10,000. There was a fair amount of trial and error involved in copying and pasting just the right amount of text into the FF editor so as not to run afoul of the maximum character limit.

I found that I had to break the story into sections, which I labeled myself. My self-titled selections are along the lines of "Pt. 1," "Pt. 10," "Pt. 20," and so on. But now with the automatic chapter numbering, the titles read like "Chapter 29, Pt. 22," which makes it seem like there are 22 parts to Chapter 29. It's really frustrating.

I'm sure the readers can figure it out, but it's the principle of the thing.

Maybe eventually I'll go back and change the titles so they're less confusing, but that's an awful lot of tedious extra work.

Glad to reply, and no, we don’t have to like the primordial plain text emphasis formatting!



My and others’ lobbying did pay off: the auto-inserted chapter titles are editable. I edit them at the time of posting, with Chapter 3 Exciting Developments!, Chapter 3 Part 2, Chapter 3 Part 3, etc. And of course the FF system messes with capitalization, but one step at a time. 🙄

For character counts, i’m on a Macintosh and using BBEdit to process my HTML masters (from the original manuscripts done in RTF then broken HTML out of TextEdit). BBEdit makes character counting easy, allowing me to use human artistic judgement for where to break my chapters for FF and Dimensions (when my stories aren‘t being banned from Dimensions). Any need for character counting or any additional processing whatsoever takes away from writing/creating time, as you know, but at least BBEdit and other good text editing programs like it take out some of the pain.

I also post my stories across multiple sites. However, I haven't run into the technical difficulties elsewhere that I've run into here on FF.

I just discovered that DeviantArt also apparently has tweaked its formatting somewhat. I used to be able to add basic HTML tags to get my stories to default to a serif font and to indent each paragraph. But now it seems like that's been replaced by CSS. I tried to copy the CSS code that shows up in the editor so I could duplicate the style of my older posts, but it doesn't work. The CSS code shows up as text when it's published. Another minor annoyance.

I'd have to say that Curvage seems to have hit the sweet spot. Text doesn't retain the emphasis formatting I like so much when I copy and paste it into the editor there, but I guess it's not too much trouble to add it manually with the appropriate buttons.

Archive of Our Own exists and it is free.

It's also a formatting wet dream.

You’re a level or several beyond me, in terms of trying to get more out of DA. I’m very comfortable working in HTML and CSS, but haven’t bothered messing with what DA does. No surprise they’ve changed things: seems like they’ve been on a multi-year process to modernize the site’s technical infrastructure. For many of us, it’s been a painful experience.



For me, copy/pasting is browser-specific. With Safari, my emphasis is retained on both Curvage and DA, copypastaing rendered content from my own site. Curvage does passably sane things with the line spacing, even if not what i truly want. DA doesn’t.

If i instead use Firefox, last i checked i lose the emphasis. Firefox changes versions so often, that might have changed.

If i source from text in BBEdit i can do better with line spacing, but lose the emphasis. I use emphasis so much that usually i’m better slogging through the line spacing issues.

It’s beyond me why sites can’t/won’t accept authors’ submissions in HTML or RTF or something. Especially with HTML, it’s easy to auto-strip out all tags other than whatever limited subset a site wants to support, all Javascript (for those nasty enough to try and get away with things), etc., leaving only the safe, basic HTML the site supports. Also easy enough for the site to list CSS classes it allows for stories, and strip out any classes/IDs it doesn’t allow upon submission.

Correction: should be easy. I’ve never built a site which accepts public submissions like this. Maybe it’s not as easy as it seems to do safely.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out. Anything to make formatting easier across multiple sites.

DA is...interesting. I think since the focus seems to be mostly on visual art, there's just not as much functionality for "literary" submissions. And honestly, I wish they would refer to it as "the written word" or something less highfalutin. I don't really think of my stories as "literature" in the same sense that I tend to use the term.

There's also the problem of indiscriminate "watching." I can't keep up. I used to operate on the "you watch me, I'll watch you" principle. It's a nice gesture, but I really don't know what someone sharing unicorn drawings (no offense to unicorn drawers) would see in my stories, and vice versa. But I guess that's a broader issue above and beyond simple formatting.


That's pretty much where I am. It's easy to nitpick, but I don't have idea one about what goes into running a website like this. Sure, there are features I wish FF had, but I'm publishing content here with a decent amount of exposure, so I don't feel entitled to complain too much.

The Augmentor:


As far as i’m concerned they can call it anything they want, as long as they make it more functional.

It’s not just writers who have a problem: anyone with multi-part “deviations” lacks any navigation support from the DA system. Visual artists as well as we word-workers need to make it easy for their followers to move from first image to second image to third image etc. Each artist has to build their own navigation, if they even figure out that the Link button is hidden under the Media button, which barfs up all kinds of distracting animated emojis and more nonsense. Hyperlinks have been the basis of the WWW since its birth, and DA can’t even build in site-standardized chapter navigation?!



I never went there. I’m so old school i didn’t even have Favorites or anything on-site: just filed away WWW browser bookmarks for stuff i liked.