what happened to my apostrophes?

[tenyari]

First of all a big thanks to everybody who has posted advice and links on how to address this problem. I went back and saved my stories as .txt. files and resubmitted them, but they were rejected! arrrrrrrrgh! The reson given was that the submission was garbled. I will try again. I have to get it right some time!

I hate to say it... cause I said it once already, but the ASSTR guidelines I posted address this issue in one click.

To summarize, you don't want to save as text, you want to save as MS-DOS formatted text. The option that creates a .asc file.

You can open that .asc file in notepad or any other text editor and it will be clean.

You can even rename it to file.txt if you want.

It will made line breaks at 7x characters (76 I think) but html posts will ignore these.

Of most utility, it will give you something you can post ANYWHERE, not just Literotica.

 

[Weird Harold]

It will made line breaks at 7x characters (76 I think) but html posts will ignore these.

Of most utility, it will give you something you can post ANYWHERE, not just Literotica.

I can think of at least two other story sites where the ASSTR format with fixed line lengths will screw up your submissions.

Some HTML commands will ignore the forced line breaks, but others will treat each line as a separate paragraph.

Literotica and the two other sites, use scripts to parse text files and insert explicit paragraph breaks and expect "flat text" files (with no forced line breaks inside paragraphs.) instead of "text with line breaks" or fixed line length .ASC files.

The ASSTR reference is a verygood source for understanding Plain Text and ASCII files, but it does NOT produce files in the format that Literotica expects.

 

[Alex De Kok]

Preview

The instructions on submitting stories in my 'How-To' on using Bold or Italic in your submissions are those I use successfully myself.

I would draw attention to point 16 of the 'How-To', viz

Preview your efforts via the Preview button, and when you are happy, press the Submit button

I always preview! This allows you to see what your submission will look like when it's posted. So far (touches wood and crossess fingers) I've had no problems. I'll be using my method again later in the week!

Alex

 

[tenyari]

Originally posted by Weird Harold I can think of at least two other story sites where the ASSTR format with fixed line lengths will screw up your submissions.

Ok.
Name them.

I have four stories here that prove that Literotica is not among the list of sites that will have issues.

Likewise ASSTR, ASSM, Storiesonline, Indian Outlaw, and a number of other places.

Some HTML commands will ignore the forced line breaks, but others will treat each line as a separate paragraph.

PRE tag is the only place this is an issue, and the method in the FAQ which I summarized will produce nice highly readable results when within a PRE tag.

Readability is ideal at around 80 characters per line after all. Not using such a width tends to cause more problems than it solves.

The ASSTR reference is a verygood source for understanding Plain Text and ASCII files, but it does NOT produce files in the format that Literotica expects.

Well, I know for a fact that it does.


The best thing about the method I mention is that it strips out all of the illegal characters by converting them to viable ascii equivalents.

smart quotes become ", en-dashes become -, apostrophes become ', and so on.

Saving as ascii text without going through this may not perform this conversion for all characters.

 

[Weird Harold]

Ok.
Name them.

Readability is ideal at around 80 characters per line after all. Not using such a width tends to cause more problems than it solves.

The ASSTR reference is a very good source for understanding Plain Text and ASCII files, but it does NOT produce files in the format that Literotica expects.

Well, I know for a fact that it does.

EroticStories/NiceStories have trouble with fixed line length stories, as does/did White Shadow/BlackSpectre.

Literotica's script is versatile enough to deal with fixed line length stories, but they are NOT what it expects -- it has to detect them and change parsing algoritms to deal with them -- sometimes to the detriment of the author's desired paragraph breaks.

Readability on the web is best at 80-90% of screen width -- something that Lit handles well because it removes fixed line lengths. On a "standard" text display of 80 chracters by 25 lines -- the "standard" that usenet and ASSTR hang onto -- ideal line length is 65-70 characters (or about 80-85% of screen width)

Fixed line lengths are a hold-over from the days when all computers used a fixed screen font -- almost every browser defaults to Arial proportional font unless another font is specified in the HTML page. Literotica specifies "Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif," which are all proportional fonts that are unsuited to fixed line lengths based on character counts.

(FWIW, one reason Literotica can accept fixed line length stories is because I submitted one when the scripts were in the testing phase and the script screwed it up badly. Unfortunately, they still can't handle RTF or DOC format without Laurel's intervention.)

 

[tenyari]

Ideal readability is not based on a percentage of anything.

It's a hard physical width based on how far the eye has to move from the end of one line to get to the beginning of another.

In 10-12 point type on a screen, that comes in around 70-80 characters or so.

In print, it tends to be about what you see in a paperback novel. This is why many larger format books break text up into columns -if the graphic designer has anything of a clue that is.

-------------------------------------------------

I'll check the two sites you mentioned, but the method DOES work here.

Again, the primary reason for choosing it is to get all of your special characters converted properly.

Unless you follow the rather complex scripting suggestions also in the ASSTR FAQ Word will automatically insert a number of special characters for certain keys on the keyboard such as " ' and -.

One Word creation that the 'save as .asc' method does not address is what Word does to ...
Other than that though, I get good results with it. I fix that one with a replace scan before saving out of word, replacing ... with ... (which may seem strange, but it removes Word's custom ... character.)

 

[Weird Harold]

Ideal readability is not based on a percentage of anything.

In static, printed media, that's true, but when you have old, weak eyes, as I do, and use the View/Text size/Large option, static line lengths cause problems -- 80% of the screen width is the ideal width for larger text sizes.

On high resolution screens that can display 132 characters or 256 characters of a fixed 12 pt font , fixed line lengths of 65 to 70 are short columns that cover less than half the screen.

Fixed line length submissions DO work at Lit -- I don't deny that -- but they work because Lit's script REMOVES the fixed line lengths.

The single character ellipsis is easy to turn off in MS Word, and there are other special characters -- like the single character Em-dash that also need to be turned off becaue Word doen't convert them to ASCII or MSDOS Text. If youread the excerpt from MS Word 97's help file, you'll find that what Word replaces depends on the autocorrect settings -- searching for "..." will replace the single character or WITH the single character ellipsis, depending how you have it set.

Also, the ASSTR article you're so fond of doesn't address WordPerfect's special characters which cause more problems with submissions than MS Word's do.

Check out my How To essay to see some other special characters might cause problems and how to tell if they'll translate properly to Lit's format.

 

[SlickTony]

Every now and then you come across a story that has gross technical problems, i.e. the text extends into the blue Literotica logo and you can't read it. I can't think of a single story with this problem that wasn't submitted by someone from India. I wonder if it's the problem with their servers or the word processing application they're using.

 

[Weird Harold]

Every now and then you come across a story that has gross technical problems, i.e. the text extends into the blue Literotica logo and you can't read it.

I've seen a couple that weren't from India. The few I've beenable to pinpoint a cause has long lines of asterisks marking a scene change that Lit's scripts couldn't wrap at 80% of screen width.

 

[KillerMuffin]

As far as the ASSTR/ASSM submissions go...

I do know that Laurel has to manually reformat those to work with the scripts, but she's been doing it for so long that it doesn't really not an issue unless there's no good way to use find and replace to make sure there's an extra space between paragraphs.

When I originally started submitting we had to use email submissions and she'd translate them into HTML. My WordPerfect cause a lot of problems. I used to copy and paste into wordpad and save as a .txt for her. After the scripts it was even worse because WP8 goop isn't easily resolved since she does all of her reformatting on Word.

I had to kill my styles and pare down to default settings to get it so she could read it without reformatting.

When I did my illustrated story I put the img codes in there for her and I saved it in wordperfect as HTML. Then I opened the document in a browser window. Then I viewed the source code. Then I pasted that into the script's window. Then I cut out all of the HTML except the italics and img codes and submitted it that way. That way I knew there would be no wordprocessor goop.

 

[SlickTony]

Noticed your tagline, OWH, at the same time I noticed that I had crossed from merely "experienced" to "really experienced." Is "opinionated old fart" above Literotica guru?

 

[Weird Harold]

Noticed your tagline, OWH, at the same time I noticed that I had crossed from merely "experienced" to "really experienced." Is "opinionated old fart" above Literotica guru?

At 1000 posts, you can choose your own title. I chose mine the day I made Guru -- for posts 501 through 1000 my signature was "I'm NOT a Guru, I'm just an Opinionated Old Fart."