Story Formatting Tool

[WaxPhilosophic]

The New Story input form here sadly lacks even basic text formatting. You can coax out bold, italic, center, etc., but only if you enter HTML tags by hand.

So, I came up with my own formatting tool. It's pretty self explanatory, and you can find it on my web site, here:

https://waxphilosophic.sdf.org/LitMark/

In a nutshell, you can do bold, italic, and centering by highlighting a passage and clicking a button (or using familiar keyboard shortcuts.) There's also a find feature and rudimentary undo.

It is NOT a text editor. It's just a formatter.

Write your erotic masterpiece in a word processor and copy the finished story to the clipboard. Paste it in the lovely online formatter and mark it up to your heart's content. When you're done, copy back to the clipboard and paste into Lit's New Story form (or download it as a file.)

Everything runs in your web browser. There's no backend processing or cloud anything. Keeping The Man out of your stories.

Use it if you like. https://waxphilosophic.sdf.org/LitMark/

 

[TheLobster]

You're using a regular plain text <textarea> for the input and simply adding the HTML tags. This can easily break if the user starts editing the inserted tags by hand.

I think it'd be better and less error-prone to use a rich text input (i.e. <div contenteditable>) and present a WYSIWYG formatted version that could then be exported as Lit-compatible HTML (either to clipboard or downloaded as a file).

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

“I was raised by my maternal grandparents, after my mother proved she wasn’t up to the task by bleeding out all over their guestroom bed. It was just minutes after I took my first breath... "

Ouch

It's one of my stories here, if you want to read it. https://literotica.com/s/the-future-in-our-stars

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

You're using a regular plain text <textarea> for the input and simply adding the HTML tags. This can easily break if the user starts editing the inserted tags by hand.

I think it'd be better and less error-prone to use a rich text input (i.e. <div contenteditable>) and present a WYSIWYG formatted version that could then be exported as Lit-compatible HTML (either to clipboard or downloaded as a file).

It's a free tool. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

 

[ElectricBlue]

The New Story input form here sadly lacks even basic text formatting. You can coax out bold, italic, center, etc., but only if you enter HTML tags by hand.

Deliberately so. The site uses a house style so every story looks and feels the same when published, in terms of font, and layout. It allows limited formatting for a reason.

 

[Cagivagurl]

From those of us not so good at this stuff.
Thanks for sharing.

Cagivagurl

 

[Kelliezgirl]

It's a free tool. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

Double your money back?

Seriously, thanks for sharing.

 

[Writer61]

Thanks for sharing, but Word works for me.

 

[THBGato]

It's one of my stories here, if you want to read it. https://literotica.com/s/the-future-in-our-stars

One of my favourites of yours...

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Thanks for sharing, but Word works for me.

Same with me.

However, if there were formatting options that included things like justify right and other HTML tricks to simulate text messages, I think that this tool would be very popular.

I also tend to publish my stories in places other than Literotica, so unless I want to maintain multiple versions of a story, each with different formats, it's easier just to keep in simple in MS Word.

 

[Writer61]

However, if there were formatting options that included things like justify right and other HTML tricks to simulate text messages, I think that this tool would be very popular.

I can see that.

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

I'm not taking feature requests at this time.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

The New Story input form here sadly lacks even basic text formatting. You can coax out bold, italic, center, etc., but only if you enter HTML tags by hand.

So, I came up with my own formatting tool. It's pretty self explanatory, and you can find it on my web site, here:

https://waxphilosophic.sdf.org/LitMark/

Appreciate you sharing your formatting tool, first and foremost!

But hypothetically, is it even possible to code it so that a paste of RTF text from a word processor would automatically insert all the html tags as the output?

 

[SimonDoom]

From those of us not so good at this stuff.
Thanks for sharing.

Cagivagurl

Thanks so much for saying that . . . first. Exactly how I feel.

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

Appreciate you sharing your formatting tool, first and foremost!

But hypothetically, is it even possible to code it so that a paste of RTF text from a word processor would automatically insert all the html tags as the output?

It's plain text only. You can upload RTF as a file to the Lit New Story page though.

 

[SimonDoom]

Deliberately so. The site uses a house style so every story looks and feels the same when published, in terms of font, and layout. It allows limited formatting for a reason.

I think this is on the money. It's a feature, not a bug, although I can understand how some authors think it's a shortcoming. The Site may well have thought about this and decided that it prefers stories to have a common formatting style. I can't say I disagree with them.

 

[Cacatua_Galerita]

Thanks for sharing.

As someone who likes to review every bit of markup going into my stories, I can see value in this tool as a final sanity check.

I sure I would continue to write my stories in LibreOffice, but I’d paste the word processor’s exported HTML into your editor for a final review/preview.

Potential improvements I thought of:

1. Have the formatted preview text scroll in sync with the raw HTML pane.
2. Automatically strip away all paragraph markup (“<p>” & “</p>”) from the raw HTML. Convert everything into “\n\n” double-spacing.
3. Flag (or just strip away) any HTML that is not permitted by Literotica. E.g. I was able to add a horizontal rule, which would get removed upon story submission. So I’d like to be cleansed (or notified) of every bit of remaining markup that isn’t explicitly site supported (<table>, <input>, <font> directives and the like).
4. Try to align the preview style with the site’s CSS. Stories on the site seem to be rendered in "ProximaNovaMedium",Arial,sans-serif font (for me). LitMark’s sans-serif is close, but not quite the same. (The background colors obviously don’t match, but I preferred this as a differentiator because I always have lots of tabs and windows open).
5. An indication of where you estimate Literotica’s page-breaks will land might be helpful for some story lengths (those that fall just over a page increment).

Hopefully, one or two of the above suggestions might be easy to implement and can be added.

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

@Cacatua_Galerita: Just curious, do you save as HTML in LibreOffice and paste the contents of that directly into Lit's New Story form? I use LibreOffice as well. Whenever I've tried that method I get way more HTML tags than I want.

Your approach of stripping away everything not allowed is an interesting one. But I'll be honest, I'm not really looking to add features to the tool at the moment. I just don't have the time.

​

 

[Cacatua_Galerita]

@Cacatua_Galerita: Just curious, do you save as HTML in LibreOffice and paste the contents of that directly into Lit's New Story form? I use LibreOffice as well. Whenever I've tried that method I get way more HTML tags than I want.

Your approach of stripping away everything not allowed is an interesting one. But I'll be honest, I'm not really looking to add features to the tool at the moment. I just don't have the time.

​

I don’t have a set process. I’ve submitted one story as .doc format. The next I pasted as raw text then added some (minimal) markup. For the more complex formatting, I saved as HTML then search-and-replaced lots of markup using the vi editor (old school – but like I said, I like to see every character of my submission).

I understand about the lack of time – and I can already achieve what I want – but your tool looks like it could simplify the step between word processor and final submission.

Maybe the site will improve their publishing page along these lines?

 

[BlackFlame112000]

I'm kinda curious, what's the appeal of LibreOffice ?

Is it just hate for MicrosoftOffice or is LibreOffice better ?
I've never used it, so I am asking.

 

[EMPTYSTAR]

I'm kinda curious, what's the appeal of LibreOffice ?

Is it just hate for MicrosoftOffice or is LibreOffice better ?
I've never used it, so I am asking.

Or people are on Linux and MS Office doesn't work and LibreOffice is the closest alternative lol~

 

[BlackFlame112000]

Or people are on Linux and MS Office doesn't work and LibreOffice is the closest alternative lol~

I didn't consider that, that makes sense

Are there any other reasons apart from compatibility?

 

[firefox27eros]

Or people are on Linux and MS Office doesn't work and LibreOffice is the closest alternative lol~

StarOffice -> OpenOffice -> LibreOffice
MS Office alternative from the last 2 decades especially for Linux users.

 

[EMPTYSTAR]

I've been on Linux, I just don't have the time to keep tinkering on Arch anymore
Mint and Ubuntu were fine, but I had to switch over to Windows coz I worked from home for a good few months~

I just run Windows now with all telementry and update locked and offline version lol~

Also sure LibreOffice is FOSS
But MSOffice is one of the most pirated softwares, maybe even top 5 coz of a reason ~
Its easy af too lol

LibreOffice has its kinks with large data, maybe as a text editor its good, personal use case, It was just too crash prone when I dumped large CSV files

 

[sinfantasy]

@WaxPhilosophic - Thank you so much for this amazing tool.

This came right in the time of need. I was fiddling with Emojis for my Geek Pride story but could not figure out how this would show up on Lit, after being published from a DOCX file upload.

Thanks for your time, I could get a clear HTML conversion and fiddler around exactly what I needed. Once, I uploaded the output to Lit, it showed a clean preview on how it would look like.

You not only saved a lot of time for me, you also saved my experiment from a major flop. The emojis would never have worked straight out from the DOCX upload.

Amazing and on the money! (Thank you for keeping it free)