Weird page count issue.

[ghastly_lump_of_meat]

My latest story is around 26k words, but it's only taking up 3 pages. Really odd.

One of my earlier stories was 19k words and that took 6 pages.

Any reason for this?

 

[TheLobster]

9k words per page is really long, that’s more than twice the norm.

Does the story have overly long paragraphs that would prevent pagination? Usually this is caught and rejected, but maybe your slipped by.

 

[ghastly_lump_of_meat]

9k words per page is really long, that’s more than twice the norm.

Does the story have overly long paragraphs that would prevent pagination? Usually this is caught and rejected, but maybe your slipped by.

Nah. The paragraphs are normal. The paragraphs are just like in any other of my stories I've published.

 

[TheLobster]

It would be good to provide a link to the story in question, since this is quite a curiosity.

I trust that you verified no content is missing and that the pages are simply very long?

 

[ghastly_lump_of_meat]

It would be good to provide a link to the story in question, since this is quite a curiosity.

I trust that you verified no content is missing and that the pages are simply very long?

Yup, no content is missing. The pages are simply long without reason.

Link to the story in question (proceed with caution haha): https://www.literotica.com/s/trans-bull-knocks-up-my-wife-01

 

[EmilyMiller]

Your first page is over 7,000 words, I haven’t looked at the second, but the third is barely a few hundred. I agree it’s weird.

 

[TheLobster]

Okay, this is really intriguing and definitely warrants a bug report. My guess is that you’ve done something odd with paragraph spacing; there are large vertical gaps around your separators that I haven’t seen anywhere else on Lit. It might’ve thrown off the pagination algorithm.

I’m kinda curious if your readers will notice. As far as serious bugs go, this one is pretty harmless.

 

[lovecraft68]

I just pasted page one into a word docu and it came out to 7219 words

Lit pages have always been roughly 36-3700 words, this is twice as much.

This site is glitching at a level I've never seen before.

 

[ghastly_lump_of_meat]

Okay, this is really intriguing and definitely warrants a bug report. My guess is that you’ve done something odd with paragraph spacing; there are large vertical gaps around your separators that I haven’t seen anywhere else on Lit. It might’ve thrown off the pagination algorithm.

I’m kinda curious if your readers will notice. As far as serious bugs go, this one is pretty harmless.

Oh, those large spaces around the chapters/acts were my doing. But those were the only instances where I used such odd formatting techniques, the rest of the story/paragraphs was spaced normally.

I should report a bug though.

Thanks.

 

[lovecraft68]

Okay, this is really intriguing and definitely warrants a bug report. My guess is that you’ve done something odd with paragraph spacing; there are large vertical gaps around your separators that I haven’t seen anywhere else on Lit. It might’ve thrown off the pagination algorithm.

I’m kinda curious if your readers will notice. As far as serious bugs go, this one is pretty harmless.

But wouldn't the odd-and large spacing-add pages, not shorten them?

 

[TheLobster]

But wouldn't the odd-and large spacing-add pages, not shorten them?

There are thousand and one ways in which a pagination algorithm could be written. Since it seems to have failed here, and those spaces are an anomaly, it's reasonable to postulate these two phenomena (the failure and the spacing) are related.

But this is just hypothesizing. We don't know the internals of the Lit's publication pipeline, so any speculations about the exact interaction would be laden with tons of assumptions we have no way to verify.

 

[RejectReality]

Page 2 is 18k words when pasted into Word. Something is absolutely bonkers. LOL

Could be a good or bad thing. It might attract more attention because it's giving a false impression it's shorter, causing more people to click it. If they're caught up in the story once there and don't feel the length, it could be a huge boon for the story.

On the bad side, that second page would severely complicate reading it in more than one sitting.

 

[TheLobster]

I looked at the HTML and it's uncanny. Here's a sample:



Those <br>'s should've been <p>'s, i.e., paragraph breaks, instead of just line breaks. Basically, each separated section / scene in the story is physically one gigantic paragraph, so there are maybe 5 or 10 of them per each (large) page.

It's reasonable to assume the pagination procedure has some minimum number of paragraphs per page; and if the "paragraphs" are so big, then it might think it has stuffed only like 5 of them on the page, reaching said minimum, despite the fact it results in 7k+ word pages.

@ghastly_lump_of_meat How did you submit the story? Word doc? Or the submission form, with those <br>'s inserted manually?

 

[ghastly_lump_of_meat]

Page 2 is 18k words when pasted into Word. Something is absolutely bonkers. LOL

Could be a good or bad thing. It might attract more attention because it's giving a false impression it's shorter, causing more people to click it. If they're caught up in the story once there and don't feel the length, it could be a huge boon for the story.

On the bad side, that second page would severely complicate reading it in more than one sitting.

I looked at the HTML and it's uncanny. Here's a sample:

View attachment 2597971

Those <br>'s should've been <p>'s, i.e., paragraph breaks, instead of just line breaks. Basically, each separated section / scene is physically one gigantic paragraph.

It's reasonable to assume the pagination procedure has some minimum number of paragraphs per page; and if the "paragraphs" are so big, then it might think it has stuffed only like 5 of them on the page, reaching said minimum, despite the fact it results in 7k+ word pages.

@ghastly_lump_of_meat How did you submit the story? Word doc? Or the submission form, with those <br>'s inserted manually?

I posted it in the HTML form. It was like this:

<br /><br />Amber punctuated my lies by hurling the remote and impaling it straight into the TV.<br /><br />I simply heaved myself up from the bed and made my way to the living room couch—per usual.<br /><br />This was our life now. Small spats turning nuclear in seconds, her affection for me dwindling like the amount of hair on my head.<br /><br />The frequency and the intensity of our fights had been on the rise recently, while the rest all in my life was in a decline.<br /><br />Even after graduating high school, I'd never mentally <em>left</em> high school. I clung to the delusion that my faded glory still had some value in the world, that opportunities would flock to me like the adoring crowds of my past. But the world had moved on—without me—and I was just a fat, balding guy not willing to let go.<br />

This time around, as Literotica was taking so long to publish, I'd posted the story on AO3 first. And since AO3 had already converted it into HTML, I copied the HTML from the AO3 editor and pasted into Literotica. It seems like this is what has caused the issue.

Although I did check by pasting it into an "HTML to Rich Text" converter first. Everything looked perfect.

EDIT: I have posted a story on Lit earlier where I only used <br> to separate paragraphs and not <p>, there was no issue that time.

 

[lovecraft68]

Page 2 is 18k words when pasted into Word. Something is absolutely bonkers. LOL

Could be a good or bad thing. It might attract more attention because it's giving a false impression it's shorter, causing more people to click it. If they're caught up in the story once there and don't feel the length, it could be a huge boon for the story.

On the bad side, that second page would severely complicate reading it in more than one sitting.

My last two are 13/14 pages which my word count backs as far as normal 'lit length' so this is new...or maybe unique to this story or...

I give up.

 

[RejectReality]

Shocked it got through with those <br /> intact. I've had a handful trying to set off a rhyming couplet spell through single spacing get stripped out in the past. That was with a note requesting they be preserved as well. ( Which worked fine on the previous instance )

That's almost certainly what caused the pagination to cough up a hairball.

 

[old_prof]

It's going to be the explicit <br> tags rather than using new CRLF breaks between paragraphs. Based on other places, the algorithm consider <br> as being art of a paragraph.

 

[NotWise]

It's reasonable to assume the pagination procedure has some minimum number of paragraphs per page; and if the "paragraphs" are so big, then it might think it has stuffed only like 5 of them on the page, reaching said minimum, despite the fact it results in 7k+ word pages.

@ghastly_lump_of_meat How did you submit the story? Word doc? Or the submission form, with those <br>'s inserted manually?

Lit breaks pages between paragraphs. If you have a paragraph that's ten thousand words long, then that's going to be a page.

 

[TheLobster]

EDIT: I have posted a story on Lit earlier where I only used <br> to separate paragraphs and not <p>, there was no issue that time.

You probably coupled those <br>’s with actual line breaks, which Lit then interpreted as paragraphs and the pagination worked fine. For <br> tags to work as intended here, like for verse, songs, and the like, you need to keep everything as one long physical line.

Which, in case of the long-paged story, you totally did, as per the HTML you showed. This should’ve been caught before publishing and that is IMO the real bug then.

Lesson learned here is to make sure you don’t leave <br> tags if you copy-paste from other sites, since apparently Lit doesn’t catch all cases of their misuse.

@FrancesScott This might be worth adding to your HTML guide, warning people not to copy HTML recklessly from other sites like AO3.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

I posted it in the HTML form. It was like this:


This time around, as Literotica was taking so long to publish, I'd posted the story on AO3 first. And since AO3 had already converted it into HTML, I copied the HTML from the AO3 editor and pasted into Literotica. It seems like this is what has caused the issue.

Although I did check by pasting it into an "HTML to Rich Text" converter first. Everything looked perfect.

EDIT: I have posted a story on Lit earlier where I only used <br> to separate paragraphs and not <p>, there was no issue that time.

This is why you post naked text, no code at all in the submission box, then preview it.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

This is why you post naked text, no code at all in the submission box, then preview it.

I agree, but preview wouldn't help with pagination, would it?

 

[RejectReality]

I agree, but preview wouldn't help with pagination, would it?

Not anymore. I miss that. You could tweak things to get rid of those two line final pages and such. Now you just have to throw the dice. LOL

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

It makes sure you don't have any stray code that will futz with the published pages.

 

[RejectReality]

It makes sure you don't have any stray code that will futz with the published pages.

Absolutely good advice, but it would have processed the <br /> and rendered it exactly as it appears. ( Albeit on a single page ) The preview wouldn't have helped in this case since the preview is no longer paginated. Nothing would have looked odd except possibly the scene breaks. Trying to fix that might have actually made it worse by removing the spacing that wasn't generated by HTML, putting everything into what the system deemed a single paragraph, creating a 26k word page 1.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Lit breaks pages between paragraphs. If you have a paragraph that's ten thousand words long, then that's going to be a page.

So much for the idea that the Lit page length was tied to a maximum character count - a max field size. Obviously not!