Story formatting question

[JackoK]

A question by a novice writer about layout/formatting on Lit (I searched for an answer to this question but could not find one): I've noticed that the stories on Lit do not use the standard book layout form, which is that the first line of every paragraph (except the first para in a chapter/section) is indented by a few spaces and there is no extra spacing between paragraphs. On Lit the paragraphs are not indented but are spaced apart.
So when I load my story, do I need to follow this format? Put a blank line between each paragraph and not include any indenting? Or will the blank lines between paragraphs appear if I put a "carriage return" at the end of a paragraph?

 

[ElectricBlue]

So when I load my story, do I need to follow this format? Put a blank line between each paragraph and not include any indenting? Or will the blank lines between paragraphs appear if I put a "carriage return" at the end of a paragraph?

Yes. Lit publishes in its own "house style": no indents, two carriage returns at the end of each paragraph, limited html.

It's often discussed, but words tell a story, not formatting. You can pretty things up, but not all devices will see the prettiness. KISS.

 

[JackoK]

Noted ... thank you.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Noted ... thank you.

It's not so bad. I usually add the line spaces in Word by using an extra paragraph return. I guess Lit does it automatically anyway - I've never tried that.

There are a few options you can use. A row of asterisks can be used to separate sections, particularly to separate a header from the text itself ("All characters in this are over eighteen, blah, blah . . ."). Use can use a row of # symbols too, which works well to separate something at the bottom. ("Locations depicted here really existed, blah, blah . . .")

If you really want to, you can use boldface for section titles, but that is pretty rare for short stores. If you have a sequel or chapters, you can link back to earlier works (usually at the top) by using HTML (the <a href> tag). You can link to other sections of the site from within a story, but not outside sites. Links for those are reserved for the forum.

It's worth putting in your own HTML, which 95% of the time will just be italics, bold, and links. They are quite easy to use. You can look at the results in the preview mode of the submission box, and that is very much worth doing. Errors in HTML will show up there - I've never seen it otherwise - and you can go back and fix them in the editing mode. If you leave out the closing tag for italics, then everything below that will be italics too. In preview mode, you can see exactly where the mistake was made.

As said above, I'm not sure that everything will show up on mobile phones. I do it anyway.

 

[PennameWombat]

It's not so bad. I usually add the line spaces in Word by using an extra paragraph return. I guess Lit does it automatically anyway - I've never tried that.

I generally submit a Word (97-2003 doc format) file and mostly follow the LitE layout (line break between paragraphs, no indent). I use H3 headings or “****“ markers for section breaks. If I use bold, italics or underline it almost always comes through.

But yes, if you do this you lose the ability to preview the text as the submission process doesn’t show it. In one story I did want to be more specific so went through submitting raw text+HTML. Normally, I’ve found the doc path acceptable.

It's worth putting in your own HTML, which 95% of the time will just be italics, bold, and links. They are quite easy to use. You can look at the results in the preview mode of the submission box, and that is very much worth doing. Errors in HTML will show up there - I've never seen it otherwise - and you can go back and fix them in the editing mode. If you leave out the closing tag for italics, then everything below that will be italics too. In preview mode, you can see exactly where the mistake was made.

As said above, I'm not sure that everything will show up on mobile phones. I do it anyway.

On mobile phones or such (e.g., iPads, don’t know about other pads) it depends.

• If they use the browser on the mobile device, it’ll look essentially the same as on a PC’s browser, modulo the wordflow on the narrow screen. From what I’ve seen (iPhones and Androids), the browsers do a fine job of properly rendering stories.
• If they use the LitE mobile app, they’ll see almost nothing except plain text. It loses almost everything when it comes to formatting. This forum has occasionally had discussions around how many readers use this app, the site claims impressive numbers of downloads[1], but its users won’t see any of your formatting.

[1] I’ve downloaded it, just to occasionally use it to check out a formatting issue, mostly someone here complains about. One poster here was in high dudgeon because they’d submitted their story with some rather heavy use of italics (in the style of all inner monologue being italicised) and then viewed it on the app. All gone. But through browsers it was rendering correctly.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I generally submit a Word (97-2003 doc format) file and mostly follow the LitE layout (line break between paragraphs, no indent). I use H3 headings or “****“ markers for section breaks. If I use bold, italics or underline it almost always comes through.

But yes, if you do this you lose the ability to preview the text as the submission process doesn’t show it. In one story I did want to be more specific so went through submitting raw text+HTML. Normally, I’ve found the doc path acceptable.

On mobile phones or such (e.g., iPads, don’t know about other pads) it depends.

• If they use the browser on the mobile device, it’ll look essentially the same as on a PC’s browser, modulo the wordflow on the narrow screen. From what I’ve seen (iPhones and Androids), the browsers do a fine job of properly rendering stories.
• If they use the LitE mobile app, they’ll see almost nothing except plain text. It loses almost everything when it comes to formatting. This forum has occasionally had discussions around how many readers use this app, the site claims impressive numbers of downloads[1], but its users won’t see any of your formatting.

[1] I’ve downloaded it, just to occasionally use it to check out a formatting issue, mostly someone here complains about. One poster here was in high dudgeon because they’d submitted their story with some rather heavy use of italics (in the style of all inner monologue being italicised) and then viewed it on the app. All gone. But through browsers it was rendering correctly.

I'm not clear to me why anybody would use the LitE mobile app if phones already have a browser and you can download more of those if you choose.

 

[Defluer]

I'm not clear to me why anybody would use the LitE mobile app if phones already have a browser and you can download more of those if you choose.

Why do people go to Amazon and buy erotic stories instead of just coming here? Especially when a good percent of those are probably stolen from free sites? People are strange.

But I didn't know that about the app losing all the HTML stuff, I've started to use that in my last several stories and I doubt I'll stop, I like it. I used to just put stuff I wanted to emphasis in all caps. "WATCH OUT!" And I still do but I'm moving towards bold/italics. I didn't know that you could link stuff. Since I often reference my other stories, now I'm wondering if I should link to them, but I'm sure readers mostly don't give a fuck about my stories being a shared universe.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Why do people go to Amazon and buy erotic stories instead of just coming here? Especially when a good percent of those are probably stolen from free sites? People are strange.

But I didn't know that about the app losing all the HTML stuff, I've started to use that in my last several stories and I doubt I'll stop, I like it. I used to just put stuff I wanted to emphasis in all caps. "WATCH OUT!" And I still do but I'm moving towards bold/italics. I didn't know that you could link stuff. Since I often reference my other stories, now I'm wondering if I should link to them, but I'm sure readers mostly don't give a fuck about my stories being a shared universe.

NB you can only link within Literotica. Off-site links won't be accepted.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Why do people go to Amazon and buy erotic stories instead of just coming here? Especially when a good percent of those are probably stolen from free sites? People are strange.

But I didn't know that about the app losing all the HTML stuff, I've started to use that in my last several stories and I doubt I'll stop, I like it. I used to just put stuff I wanted to emphasis in all caps. "WATCH OUT!" And I still do but I'm moving towards bold/italics. I didn't know that you could link stuff. Since I often reference my other stories, now I'm wondering if I should link to them, but I'm sure readers mostly don't give a fuck about my stories being a shared universe.

I've known about that issue for some time now. I'm assuming - hoping even - that the majority of mobile phone readers are not using the Lit app. If some are - well, that's their choice.

 

[tenyari]

If you search about this topic online you'll find that indenting paragraphs has largely fallen out of favor in modern decades as more and more writing goes to digital formats.

The old indent method was used without a blank line between paragraphs. The modern trend is no indentation and a blank line.

This was forced on people due to the HTML tagging of the < P > tag. But it's also visually more readable on a screen.

When I looked this up this now (web search), I saw a lot of posts noting that it's still an issue in conflict in schools. Some teachers will mark a student down for indenting, and another will mark them down for not doing it. Some teachers were online complaining about students not indenting, while others were telling them 1970 was that way ---->.

Another change you might notice is how there is a good chance you are reading my post using a sans-serif font. In older print serif fonts were for body copy, and sans-serif was only for titles and other callouts. The opposite has become true online.

The two things that haven't changed is that first a body of text is still ideally most readable at around 80 or so characters per-line, as that makes it easier for the eye to jump down to the next line with as little muscle work as possible. Second that UPPERCASE is not used for body as it is less readable - at least with the western alphabet, you can read by scanning the tops of letters with lowercase, thus getting through a line faster, but with UPPERCASE you need to look at the whole letter, thus slowing your eye down.