Chapterization in Lit stories

[cahab]

You can always cut and paste to the word processor of your choice, and the let your printer rip !!!!

Nah, that would require, like, effort and stuff. And moving stuff around one-handed is such a pain.

 

[PAUL C]

Disagree

If what follows is seperate from what came before and from what follows then call it a chapter by all means. Does it hinder the story or move it along? Does it make it easier to read? Less confusing? Use them. I know I do.

 

[MathGirl]

Word Processors

Really, MathGirl, you should have some word processor that is more usefull than Notepad.

Dear Quaz,
Thank you for the information.

I use WORDPad, not NotePad. NotePad is useful for grocery lists, but that's about all.

My computer has MSWord on it, but it seems needlessly complicated. It's a wonderful program, but I only need about 5% of its capability.

WordPad seems to work okay for me. It doesn't count words or spell check, but I don't care how long something is and I already know how to spell. I would like the word counter, though. When someone writes about a 2000 word story, I have no idea how long it is.

I wrote a 322 page, single spaced doctoral dissertation with WPad, and it seemed to work out okay.
MG

 

[cahab]

Re: Word Processors

Dear Quaz,
Thank you for the information.

I use WORDPad, not NotePad. NotePad is useful for grocery lists, but that's about all.

My computer has MSWord on it, but it seems needlessly complicated. It's a wonderful program, but I only need about 5% of its capability. MG

Then just write in WordPad as usual, then load it up in Word and check the wordcount. Simple enough.

And Word isn't complicated. You can use it just like Wordpad. Just ignore stuff you don't need. Depending on the version, You can customize it to do as much or as little as you like. You could even get someone else to do it for you, and mail you the template (just make sure you run a virus checker on it). The same is true of most other decent word processors.

I use word for everything, but when I write for Lit I use it pretty much like wordpad, copying and pasting when done. It's useful to have a spell checker run on stuff, just to be able to double check yourself (although it is terribly naive, and for some reason I can't get it to use the built in UK dictionary, so I have to keep telling it that spellings are actually ok).

The only problem with some versions is getting that bloody paperclip to stop doing things without being asked. If they hadn't chucked him for the latest versions I was going to start a hate campaign.

I wrote a 322 page, single spaced doctoral dissertation with WPad, and it seemed to work out okay.

Watch this space for MathGirl's next story 'How I Did It Standing Up In A Hammock'.

 

[Gabriel_Lee]

I agree with MG. Wordpad is fine. MS Word is incredibly annoying, it always seems to think it knows more about what I want to write than I do. The wordcount feature is nice, though.

GL

 

[Rainbow Skin]

WordPad is fine. Okay, if you really want to know the number of words, say if it's very short and you might not be hitting LE's 750 minimum, C&P into Word and use &T | W. But basically WordPad does everything. Word used to be a good program - still is, sort of, but there are more and more features where the default is WRONG. Shit like turning ordinals '1st', '2nd' into superscript: huh? When's the last time you saw a book like that? So you have to spend days turning off customizations before it works properly.

Shit like turning '...' into a special '...' character.

Shit like throwing away tabs and huffing and puffing, 'I know you didn't really want to indent with a single tab character, so I changed the opening line spacing for you.'

 

[Weird Harold]

Please tell me if I am wrong, but I have been assuming that the number in the character count would not change, no matter what font the author is using, even if he uses one similar to the top line in an eye chart.

That is correct, the character count always stays the same as do the Lit page breaks , but MS Word and WordPerfect both paginate based on what is going to fit on a printed page -- font size, font choice, and margin settings all affect that.

The scripts doesn't count in words. It counts in characters and lines. You get so many characters per line and so many lines per page. It can do word wrap, so a word isn't cut in the middle because it chooses to cut a line based on the token--the space--rather than because it ran out of room for characters.

Actually, the scripts count characters and recognise paragraph breaks -- the word wrap function is provided by the browser and changes when you change the text size setting.

The target size for a Lit page is a 25KB .HTML file -- including story text, HTML code, scripting for the banners, and the code for voting.

9-10 KB of that is "overhead" -- the HTML code, scripting and such. That leave 15KB to 16KB for the story text (and embedded HTML for italics and bold.)

The last page of a story reduces the amount of story text by the amount of code required for the feedback and voting options.

The scripts count off the allowable number of characters and then find the nearest paragraph break, and check to see how much remains to try and prevent single line continuation pages. (the orphan setting is apparently very small, because I've seen stories that have only one or two lines, on the second page and one that had only the voting and feedback options.)


The primary reason for breaking stories into 25KB pages is to make Lit load at consistent speeds for dial-up users.

The 25KB limit also saves Literotica bandwidth because opening a story doesn't force you to download an entire novel-length page just to back out when you discover it's not what you thought. Lit only needs to use the additional bandwidth required for the text over 25KB for people who will actually read it.

I think, the scripts dynamically format pages as they are sent, so any manual changes to the display files would be undone as soon as another user requested the file. I'm certain manual changes to the display files would be undone every time the site required "regeneration."

Any major changes to the page format would be expensive and time-consuming because it would require a major change in the scripts to implement a new philosphy for controlling the page breaks.