Formatting suggestion, a little help, please...

[ShelbyDawn57]

Working on my Valentine's story and have an idea I really like but it's giving me some issues. (don't they all?)

On one side, I have the story of the three MCs. On the other, the gods messing with them. What I'm trying to figure out is the best way to interject the gods running dialog within the story of the MCs.
As it is now, I'm separating them into blocks with *** and I don't like it.

I need something that works over the entire story that fits in with Lit's limited formatting options.

Thanks

 

[cw5523729]

Working on my Valentine's story and have an idea I really like but it's giving me some issues. (don't they all?)

On one side, I have the story of the three MCs. On the other, the gods messing with them. What I'm trying to figure out is the best way to interject the gods running dialog within the story of the MCs.
As it is now, I'm separating them into blocks with *** and I don't like it.

I need something that works over the entire story that fits in with Lit's limited formatting options.

Thanks

Simple BOLD CAPITAL text? That strikes me as very God-ish.

 

[alohadave]

Right justified text

Use guillemets (french quotation marks)

 

[YmaOHyd]

Is the commentary happening as the story is told? Like, I do a thing, Zeus says something snarky, I do the next thing? Or is it more chunked-off: the gods say some stuff, Shelby and I go to dinner, have a drink, she hits me with a potted plant, I wake up in the hospital, the gods say more stuff?

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Is the commentary happening as the story is told? Like, I do a thing, Zeus says something snarky, I do the next thing? Or is it more chunked-off: the gods say some stuff, Shelby and I go to dinner, have a drink, she hits me with a potted plant, I wake up in the hospital, the gods say more stuff?

Some of both. The inline stuff, I'm handling like normal dialog; single quoted voices in their heads. It's the interactions between the gods that comes in blocks I'm not happy with.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Could you post an example? Or DM me, if you'd prefer?

 

[SamanthaBehgs]

Simple BOLD CAPITAL text? That strikes me as very God-ish.

The only trouble I have with this is the accessibility element. It's actually harder for those with visual issues (and who use screen readers) to read bold capital letters that aren't in a specific font type designed to allow you to type both caps and non caps and have them both appear as bold caps.

I first became aware of it when I was speaking to a friend with dyslexia who loved Sir Terry Pratchett but had trouble reading Death's dialogue. This was fine in most novels where Death was sometimes there but not a big part, but made things like The Hogfather and Mort nearly impossible for them to read.

 

[TheLobster]

Do you need to intersperse the divine commentary directly into the regular narrative, or can it come as a separate scene? If the latter works, then I’d just go with ***, i.e., normal scene separators.

The former strikes me as torturing the medium of prose into appearing more cinematic that it can reasonably be (and that’s coming from someone who loves cinematic-style writing).

 

[PennyThompson]

Maybe <blockquote>, it will indent and italicize the block quote paragraph. The upside is, it's the only way I know of that you can do an indented paragraph on Lit. The downsides are that it will ALWAYS italicize, and the story Preview doesn't render it properly so you won't be able to see what it looks like until it's published. And if you accidentally don't close one of the blockquote tags, it will utterly mangle the Lit page that it's on

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Maybe <blockquote>, it will indent and italicize the block quote paragraph. The upside is, it's the only way I know of that you can do an indented paragraph on Lit. The downsides are that it will ALWAYS italicize, and the story Preview doesn't render it properly so you won't be able to see what it looks like until it's published. And if you accidentally don't close one of the blockquote tags, it will utterly mangle the Lit page that it's on

Thanks. This is what I'm looking for. Any hints, caveats, etc. on using tags in Lit?

 

[Z_TheWriter]

Thanks. This is what I'm looking for. Any hints, caveats, etc. on using tags in Lit?

I have limited experience - one story published - but the itallics end tag in my introduction moved. So maybe use separate tags for each line instead of, like me, trying to use one set for an entire section?

 

[YmaOHyd]

Thanks. This is what I'm looking for. Any hints, caveats, etc. on using tags in Lit?

I write in Word and use a macro that I found by searching around the forum. I put my bolds and italics in where I want them, then run the macro at the end of the process. More complicated stuff, like linking or alignment, I have to do manually.

The result gets saved to a separate document, so I have a Chapter 1.docx and a Chapter 1-Litformat.docx. Then I drop that in the text editor and go through the previewing process. I think in this process using the blockquote tag, you'd want to add those as the last step prior to going to the Lit text editor. And you'd want to do a search for both <blockquote> and </blockquote> to make sure you had the same number of each. As Penny said, it'll mess your formatting up in all sorts of ways, and getting it corrected requires an edit. I think Laurel expedites those if you say you've got an open tag and broken formatting, but it still takes time.

 

[PennyThompson]

Thanks. This is what I'm looking for. Any hints, caveats, etc. on using tags in Lit?

@FrancesScott's HTML formatting essay is pretty comprehensive of what Lit will allow!

The only hint I can give is to quadruple-check that you've closed all of your tags. Ask me how I know

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

@FrancesScott's HTML formatting essay is pretty comprehensive of what Lit will allow!

The only hint I can give is to quadruple-check that you've closed all of your tags. Ask me how I know

I've been doing software for thirty years, I know how you know. LOL Just not familiar with Lits restrictions on things like that in its editor.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I'd also point you to:

• the FAQ
• inbu25201's Using Special Formatting in Stories - How To

 

[dirk2024]

@FrancesScott's HTML formatting essay is pretty comprehensive of what Lit will allow!

The only hint I can give is to quadruple-check that you've closed all of your tags. Ask me how I know

I like the blockquote, just wish Lit could figure out how to make it show while editing.

 

[lovecraft68]

Use italics whenever they're speaking?

 

[FrancesScott]

@FrancesScott's HTML formatting essay is pretty comprehensive of what Lit will allow!

The only hint I can give is to quadruple-check that you've closed all of your tags. Ask me how I know

Thank you for mentioning my essay.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

One thing about blockquote that I’ve recently tested in a story edit—is that blockquote creates an additional margin of space above your paragraph line (Thanks to @TheLobster for ID-ing this months back).

So @ShelbyDawn57, if that’s not your intended look, you may want to eliminate any paragraph spacing before and after your blockquote. I can follow up with you in PM if you’d like.

 

[TheLobster]

Maybe <blockquote>, it will indent and italicize the block quote paragraph. The upside is, it's the only way I know of that you can do an indented paragraph on Lit. The downsides are that it will ALWAYS italicize, and the story Preview doesn't render it properly so you won't be able to see what it looks like until it's published. And if you accidentally don't close one of the blockquote tags, it will utterly mangle the Lit page that it's on

I believe Shelby knows her way around technology and can safely test blockquotes in Preview by injecting custom CSS to format those blocks the same way that the published stories do. For the record, the styles to add are the following:

blockquote {
    margin: 0;
    margin-top: 3rem;
    padding-left: 3rem;
    font-style: italic;
}

The "margin-top" part is what adds the extra space above the blockquote; you should remove any paragraph spacing above your <blockquote> tags to account for it.