When I submit a story to the Eunuch Archive, it is formatted the way I want it to be. When it appears in the Archive, it has been re-formatted capriciously, illogically, and in no way beneficially.

What imaginable reason can there for separating the last line or two from the rest of the paragraph and making it or them a mini-paragraph ? Why is a paragraph divided into two parts, not merely in the middle of the paragraph, but in the middle of a sentence ?

Why can you not leave the original formatting of the story alone ? At least when I do it, it is logical and intentional. These editorial emendations have NEVER yet been an improvement.

Do you feel a need to be creative ? If so, write a story of your own and format it however you wish, but refrain from marring the works of others !

Bagoas (imported) wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2007 1:30 pm When I submit a story to the Eunuch Archive, it is formatted the way I want it to be. When it appears in the Archive, it has been re-formatted capriciously, illogically, and in no way beneficially.

What imaginable reason can there for separating the last line or two from the rest of the paragraph and making it or them a mini-paragraph ? Why is a paragraph divided into two parts, not merely in the middle of the paragraph, but in the middle of a sentence ?

Why can you not leave the original formatting of the story alone ? At least when I do it, it is logical and intentional. These editorial emendations have NEVER yet been an improvement.

Do you feel a need to be creative ? If so, write a story of your own and format it however you wish, but refrain from marring the works of others !

Generally speaking, stories are not manually reformatted. Plix and crew don't have time to do all of that sort of thing, editing, formatting, spell checking, etc. This has been an issue since the beginning of the Archive, and there ain't much that is gonna get done about it. Please remember that Bboy wrote all of the code for the story archive, and kept adding stuff as it grew and went along. In large measure it is quite a stew of code. To redo it would require taking it all down, re-entering all the stories etc.

We just live with it, because to do anything else is to eliminate it. There is NO where else on the net with a collection such as ours, and continuously growing. In past, when submitting, I cut and pasted my stories into the submission form, and then went back and re-checked the formatting after the paste. Sometimes it needs adjusting at that point. If paragraph breaks are critical, insert a paragraph break.

Back in the day, it used to be that when you wrote a story, if you hit the ENTER key in MS Word or whatever to cause a line break, it would cause a double line break when the system that archives stories here got a hold of it. I don't know if that is still the case or not. Also, it used to be that tabs, indentations, and bold or italic text, etc., was not preserved. If you wanted that, you had to type up your story with [ b ] and [ / b ] codes in it, put in manually.

As of now, I have no idea how the formatting code works.

Are you talking about things you've submitted lately, or older stories?

I know some of the old stuff, mine included, is now very oddly spaced and all of the text layout is gone or either screwed up into almost unreadability.

Tis true. Some stories are formatted in such a way that it is impossible to read, and that was the authors fault.

IE is the best resource when it comes to story formatting.

There have even been instances of folks putting in 35 paragraph tags along with special style sheeting to try and decorate. That is crazy.

Long ago Bboy and I discussed this. Send us a story our way or don't send it at all. The concept there was let the reader decide how to display a story. In honesty, it was me that brought the topic up. My concern was how to easily change the format of stories, worry about those of us that don't read so well, and just plain ease of reading (he liked it scrunched up. I liked it full screen)

So there you go, more history.

tal

Your story was not reformatted or altered by me in any way. What happened is that it was formatted incorrectly by the submission process. What Paolo said is probably what happened.

Had I caught the problem, I would have corrected it. However, you are one of the authors whose stories I was told to auto-accept, so I don't really bother looking at them all that closely. Looks like even for those authors I will need to take a closer look

As for formatting standards on the EA, they are set and are not going to change. This was affirmed by a vote by members a while back. A solid majority of readers wanted one font and one format for the stories they read.

A while ago I wrote some perl to screen-scrape the archives into a DB for searching cause I couldnt find a story I knew I'd read. In the process it stripped out the formatting and did a reasonably good job of normalizing it into paragraphs. I'd be willing to see if I couldnt dig up the code or have a crack at it again if you guys wanted.

talula wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2007 9:07 pm Long ago Bboy and I discussed this. Send us a story our way or don't send it at all. The concept there was let the reader decide how to display a story. In honesty, it was me that brought the topic up. My concern was how to easily change the format of stories, worry about those of us that don't read so well, and just plain ease of reading (he liked it scrunched up. I liked it full screen)

So there you go, more history.

tal

The bottom line is, sometimes the formatter that controls the show doesn't play nice with all the myriad versions of all the myriad word smashers out there - MS Word, Corel, what have you...when you think about it, with all the encoding schemes out there, we're lucky to have what we have.