Font and Orientation Change within Story Upload

[JordynsCanvas]

I swear I checked the FAQ's first, but can't find the answer...

If I change font and orientation within the story and then paste it into the submission tool, will it end up posting properly?

There's a portion of my story that is text messaging between characters. I wanted to use a different font, and center it. If different font doesn't work, can i reduce the size and center for the text messages?

Thanks

 

[MillieDynamite]

I don't think you have any choice of font or orientation for the page.

 

[NotWise]

I swear I checked the FAQ's first, but can't find the answer...

If I change font and orientation within the story and then paste it into the submission tool, will it end up posting properly?

There's a portion of my story that is text messaging between characters. I wanted to use a different font, and center it. If different font doesn't work, can i reduce the size and center for the text messages?

Thanks

Generally, if you need the readers to understand something about your story ("this is a text message," for instance) you're best off making that clear in the text, and not depending on typography to do the job for you.

The site doesn't give you many choices about the presentation. They want the stories they publish to have a consistent appearance. The type face is Verdana and the size is specified by the site. You can choose to italicize the characters and I think you can make them boldface, but I haven't tried that, so maybe not.

To specify the slant or weight, use a docx file, an rtf file, or insert the html code in your document.

I'm even less sure about centering. I think you can center, but again you need to submit a docx file, an rtf file, or add the html code in your document.

 

[ElectricBlue]

- keep it simple - EB suggested, sending the OP a text.

You don't really need to designate texts with clever fonts and non-standard formatting. There are plenty of ways to designate texting, without getting too clever. When html goes wrong, it can go spectacularly wrong - and it's always because you forgot to do something.

Simplicity and context will always make it clear what's going on.

 

[Bamagan]

I swear I checked the FAQ's first, but can't find the answer...

If I change font and orientation within the story and then paste it into the submission tool, will it end up posting properly?

There's a portion of my story that is text messaging between characters. I wanted to use a different font, and center it. If different font doesn't work, can i reduce the size and center for the text messages?

Thanks

The font (typeface and size) is controlled by the site, although in the 'modern' interface the reader can select a few different options for both. For your submitted text, you can italicize it, make it bold, or underline it for emphasis, but that's about it. Some emojis can be inserted. You can use html code to align a paragraph left, right, or center. Most other formatting is disallowed.
I have occasionally seen people use |some| [kind] of {bracket} to distinguish between something a character is reading as opposed to hearing. I don't know if it helps readers or not. Simpler is usually better, as others have said.

 

[PennyThompson]

People have different opinions on this, but personally I've used HTML trickery to format text message conversations, and I've been happy with the result! It's finnicky though, and easy to screw up. I messed up a tag the first time I did this, and then had to submit an edit and wait almost a month for the edit to go through... so continue at your own risk

I think you probably need to submit your story as Story Text and not as a file. I'm not positive, maybe you can accomplish this with a .doc or .txt file, but given how long it takes to edit a mistake, I haven't risked it.

Although none of the Lit formatting guides I've found mentions this, you can use

</br>

tags to force line breaks without creating new paragraphs. Combine that with

<u>

and

<div align="right">

and you can do a reasonably good text message conversation!

So this is what the code looks like:

<u>Sent at 9:20am</u></br>Hi Marci, you wanted</br>me to message you??</br>

<div align="right"><u>Sent at 9:24am</u></br>Penny hiii :D</br>How are you doing?</br>I wanted to check on</br>you after last night.</br>How are you doing?</br></div>

Notice that I don't put any natural line breaks between texting lines, I only use the line break tag. If you don't do that, you'll end up with big paragraph gaps between each line. This is how it renders as a Lit story:

 

[JordynsCanvas]

Thank you for taking the time to explain this.

 

[PennyThompson]

Thank you for taking the time to explain this.

No problem, questions like this have been coming up every couple of weeks, so I already had it in the chamber

Also, you can absolutely insert emojis into a Lit story as well! I use them sparingly, but I did include some in a text message sent by a gen z character.

(You might notice that the line breaks in the text message on that story look a little wonky, I did the line break tags wrong on that one... but it's readable, so I haven't bothered to submit an edit on it )

 

[TheLobster]

Also, you can absolutely insert emojis into a Lit story as well! I use them sparingly, but I did include some in a text message sent by a gen z character.

You’ve got an inline hyperlink in there, and I’ve been meaning to try doing that to point to some of my stories when I mention their titles in the preamble (only in the preamble, though; doing it in the story text is kinda wild).

Did you just drop an <a href=“…”> referring directly to the other story or is there some other fancy way of doing it?

 

[PennyThompson]

You’ve got an inline hyperlink in there, and I’ve been meaning to try doing that to point to some of my stories when I mention their titles in the preamble (only in the preamble, though; doing it in the story text is kinda wild).

Did you just drop an <a href=“…”> referring directly to the other story or is there some other fancy way of doing it?

Yep, you got it! <a> tag with a direct link to an internal literotica page.

The only links Lit will accept are links to stories, author pages, and series pages, as far as I can tell. External links will get removed.

 

[RejectReality]

Yep, you got it! <a> tag with a direct link to an internal literotica page.

The only links Lit will accept are links to stories, author pages, and series pages, as far as I can tell. External links will get removed.

Forum pages as well. Some have used it to link to threads about their stories in the past.

For the most part, anything that's on the Lit server is fair game for a link, though Laurel always has the discrecion to override any of them.

Lit links are allowed because Laurel has full control over them. Any off-site link could be changed to something else in the future, and possibly something Lit doesn't want to be linking to like illegal stuff or spam. White House dot com used to lead to a porn site for a long time. May still, for all I know. LOL

That's the same reason that even fake links aren't allowed in stories. If you attach .com to anything in the text of a story, there's a good chance it's going to get rejected, even if not an actual link with the HTML to make it clickable. WillyNilly dot com may not lead to anything nefarious now, but in 10 years some scumbag could buy the domain and make a site full of scat porn and malware.