Story Formatting Tool

[TheWritingGroup]

LibreOffice uses menus, not the Ribbon. In general, (recent versions of) LibreOffice are actually substantially easier to use than MS Office. There are good products in the MS suite, notably PowerPoint, but Word is abominably hard to use for anything long. Ever paste a picture into a Word document and have it appear 12 pages away from where you meant? Doesn't happen in LO (at least to me).

--Rocco

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

@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)

I can't offer any assurances about formatting other than it can do bold, italic, and centering. That's all I've attempted to use in my stories. If you can get emoji and other characters to work, that's great! Drop a link to your story when it's published, please.

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

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.

If I remember correctly, LibreOffice had PDF and EPUB export options before M$ Orifice. That's what got me started. Also, (expletive!) software subscriptions. I'd rather donate to a community project than fatten company shareholders.

 

[lc69hunter]

I use WordPerfect, to get it right, and because Lit doesn't accept that format, I save it as an RTF and upload it

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

I use WordPerfect, to get it right, and because Lit doesn't accept that format, I save it as an RTF and upload it

I used to always upload RTFs as well. Somewhere along the line I switched to direct input into the New Story form and never looked back.

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

Against my better judgement, I have made a few enhancements to the tool.

1. Drag and drop input. Take a "Save as HTML" file (preferably from LibreOffice) and drop it on the text field to get auto-formatted results.
2. A help button. Gives a few tips about how to use the tool and also some sample files to play with.

So far, I've been able to take a document formatted as an ebook paperback, save it as HTML, and drop it on the tool to get Lit-compatible text distilled down to only minimal bold, italic, and centered formatting.

All this has been done with LibreOffice supplying the original document. No idea how it will behave with other HTML exports. Sample files are on the tool's help page for the curious: https://waxphilosophic.sdf.org/LitMark/help.html

The big advantage in my workflow is no longer having to keep two copies (a word processor original, and a dumbed-down Lit upload text file) and all the headaches that come with keeping them in sync. One file to rule them all, baby!

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

 

[sinfantasy]

I can't offer any assurances about formatting other than it can do bold, italic, and centering. That's all I've attempted to use in my stories. If you can get emoji and other characters to work, that's great! Drop a link to your story when it's published, please.

Knight's Gambit: A Code Of Desire
FFM geeks romance blooms with Chess, Code, Lust, vs A Bully!
today in First Time Stories

Damn... Lit still messed up things but good thing they are minor mistakes and can be ignored. Your tool still saved me a lot of time and achieve acceptable accuracy with minimal efforts.

Thanks again

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

Knight's Gambit: A Code Of Desire
FFM geeks romance blooms with Chess, Code, Lust, vs A Bully!
today in First Time Stories

I love what you did with the emoji separators and also using them to indicate whose point of view we are reading.