Formatting text messages in stories

[Bakerdan1975]

I'm looking for suggestions on how to format text messages. Currently, I'm using the draft box on the story submission page to submit my stories, but I'm having trouble achieving the desired look especially with the offset indentation (see image) - most likely an option when submitting a Word document, although I'd assume with the any special formatting involved, it would take longer for editors to approve the story before being published.












I'm not particularly worried about the boxes around them.
Other options I'm looking at are
Person 1: blah blah blah
Person 2: blah blah blah
Any advice or Word settings that you've used would be helpful.

Thanks everyone.
Bakerdan1975

 

[AwkwardMD]

I'm looking for suggestions on how to format text messages. Currently, I'm using the draft box on the story submission page to submit my stories, but I'm having trouble achieving the desired look especially with the offset indentation (see image) - most likely an option when submitting a Word document, although I'd assume with the any special formatting involved, it would take longer for editors to approve the story before being published.

View attachment 2569940










I'm not particularly worried about the boxes around them.
Other options I'm looking at are
Person 1: blah blah blah
Person 2: blah blah blah
Any advice or Word settings that you've used would be helpful.

Thanks everyone.
Bakerdan1975

This produces the below

 

[AwkwardMD]

I manually implemented a character limit per line (I think I picked 50 characters) and threw <br> everywhere I exceeded that in my initial writing.

 

[dirk2024]

What if it was a group chat and you needed to show which one of the group was texting?

 

[dirk2024]

I have one story published where I do this:

 

[dirk2024]

Then, I have another story where I use <blockquote> to push the text over. Written, it looks like this

 

[dirk2024]

Published, it looks like this

 

[dirk2024]

So it at least pushes it over to help seperate it from the story.

The only bad thing about blockquote is that you can't see how it will look when you review before publishing. You have to hope it will work.

 

[Britva415]

And it doesn't, by itself, solve the "text-message" issue. A series of blockquotes all look the same.

Also, OP isn't asking for HTML, they're specifically asking for Word instructions.

They seem capable of doing
Person 1: blah blah blah
Person 2: blah blah blah
which is perfect. That's ideal, to me personally.

It works even if one were to read the story in a medium which doesn't support italics. It's telling the story just with words, and not with typography.

 

[Bakerdan1975]

And it doesn't, by itself, solve the "text-message" issue. A series of blockquotes all look the same.

Also, OP isn't asking for HTML, they're specifically asking for Word instructions.

They seem capable of doing
Person 1: blah blah blah
Person 2: blah blah blah
which is perfect. That's ideal, to me personally.

It works even if one were to read the story in a medium which doesn't support italics. It's telling the story just with words, and not with typography.

Thanks for the input. The hard part is separating how it looks to me (because I know what I'm trying to do) and how it then appears to a reader. I like the person 1: / person 2: method better since I don't have to deal with all the extra code. Oh well, onwards and upwards.

 

[Bakerdan1975]

So it at least pushes it over to help seperate it from the story.

The only bad thing about blockquote is that you can't see how it will look when you review before publishing. You have to hope it will work.

Thanks for all your suggestions. I'll have a play around and see what works.

 

[Britva415]

Thanks for the input. The hard part is separating how it looks to me (because I know what I'm trying to do) and how it then appears to a reader. I like the person 1: / person 2: method better since I don't have to deal with all the extra code. Oh well, onwards and upwards.

That’s another nice feature of not relying on typography and instead telling the story with just the words: It doesn’t matter if it looks the same to different readers on different platforms and different devices. The words are all that matters.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I'm looking for suggestions on how to format text messages.

- my suggestion is to keep it really simple - he texted Sally.
- what, like this? - she replied.
- yes, keep it really simple -

In other words, don't try to be too clever. Keep it simple and readers will figure it out. You can show them exchange just like you do with dialogue, but use some other indicator that a phone is being used.

 

[nice90sguy]

This is how I did it in one of my stories. It went down well:
Use <align> tags, <hr>, italics, and arrow emojis. I experimented with face-emojis instead of those arroes, to similate WhatsApp, but it cluttered things too much

 

[AwkwardMD]

This is how I did it in one of my stories. It went down well:
Use <align> tags, <hr>, italics, and arrow emojis. I experimented with face-emojis instead of those arroes, to similate WhatsApp, but it cluttered things too much

View attachment 2574432

This is very cool

 

[nice90sguy]

^^^ this thread is a deja vu, but I cant be bothered to find the eirlier one where the identical thing was discussed (and I pasted a similar image)

FYI here are the markup codes I used.
In ms word while I was writing I used:
{me}send 500
{you}yes goddess, done

and then did a search and replace of {me} and {you} to change that to marked up text (you can use the "find what"

<hr><p align=left><i>send 500</i></p>
<p align=right><i>yes goddess, done</i></p>
<p align=left><i>more</i></p>

 

[SkyBubble]

And it doesn't, by itself, solve the "text-message" issue. A series of blockquotes all look the same.

Also, OP isn't asking for HTML, they're specifically asking for Word instructions.

They seem capable of doing
Person 1: blah blah blah
Person 2: blah blah blah
which is perfect. That's ideal, to me personally.

It works even if one were to read the story in a medium which doesn't support italics. It's telling the story just with words, and not with typography.

The one thing to watch out for here is that Lit defaults to double spaced lines. I have a story, which I am revising, which uses three lines of a song. I entered them

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3

They came out

Line 1

Line 2

Line 3

Thankfully, someone here showed me how to change that.

If you want single lines type it Line 1<br>Line 2<br>Line 3