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Question Canon content published fonts

9 years 4 months ago #1 by Amelia_R
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    • Is there a reason why Silver Ghost, Golden Angel is posted in a sans-serif font when apparently all other canon stories are in a serif font? And, does this have anything to do with the fact that in Safari (on a Mac, of course) all other stories appear with the Safari "Reader" option enabled, but SGGA does not?

    Just for the record, my old eyes really, really hate reading anything lengthy in a sans-serif font. :(
    9 years 4 months ago - 9 years 4 months ago #2 by Phoenix Spiritus
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    • The copy paste from a word processor into the content wasn't cleaned up, all the WP "set font" HTML code is still in the story.

    Someone with Editing access and HTML kudos needs to go in and clean it out.

    Yes, I did examine the web page HTML code as soon as I saw the story, it looked weird, I'm sure I wasn't the only one in this group that did.
    Last Edit: 9 years 4 months ago by Phoenix Spiritus.
    9 years 4 months ago #3 by Kristin Darken
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    • Ya, because I didn't spend my usual multiple hours cleaning up story documents in order to post clean html. so, instead of the site's CSS dictating font, the story's independent code defined how it looks.
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    9 years 4 months ago #4 by Dawnfyre
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    • and if they story was saved into plain text, then that opened in notepad ( or other basic text editor ) for the copy - paste, you lose all that encoding, including the MS "smart quotes" that never display right on a website.
    ( turning smart quotes off in ms orifice means you never have those screwey &A(gibberish) showing in published content, but people like having poorly displayed content and refuse to tun the imbecilic smart quotes off. )
    Stupidity is a capitol offense, a summary not indictable one.
    9 years 4 months ago #5 by Sir Lee
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    • There are ways to have the smart quotes display correctly.

    One, of course, is to make sure that the server HTTP headers and the HTML header META tags are set up to the actual encoding the page is using. That way, browsers have no problem correctly decoding it.

    Another way, if you don't have much control over the server, is to encode all non-7-bit-ASCII characters as HTML character entities. Browsers will interpret “ as an opening double smartquote no matter what.
    Don't call me "Shirley." You will surely make me surly.
    9 years 4 months ago #6 by mittfh
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    • Something that may / may not be of any use (and it's been a while since I last used it), but there's a free command line utility called "HTML Tidy" (built by W3C, several Win32 GUIs available) that, as its name suggests, cleans up HTML code (including removing all the MS Office proprietry stuff it adds because they think you'd want to round-trip content from Office to HTML and back into Office without losing any formatting - completely missing the point that web pages aren't supposed to behave like printed documents with fixed, absolute measurements for margins / page width etc.)
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    9 years 4 months ago #7 by Dawnfyre
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    • simplest is to save it as plain text and use that formatting and hidden coding stripped version to post online, then use the built in formatting tools on here to format it.

    since every separate document could have a different character encoding. :/ ( coming from MSO, wouldn't surprise me.)
    Stupidity is a capitol offense, a summary not indictable one.
    9 years 4 months ago - 9 years 4 months ago #8 by Phoenix Spiritus
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    • With 25k word documents re-adding formatting to an entire story is a pita.

    Copy paste in and stripping out the HTML junk code is usually easier, it's just not something all the authors can do, so unfortunately the very busy Kristin needs to do it for those who are not so HTML savvy.

    Please be patient, once her senses stop reeling from the Christmas rush of her job, I'm sure she'll get around to it.
    Last Edit: 9 years 4 months ago by Phoenix Spiritus.
    9 years 4 months ago #9 by Kristin Darken
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    • The 'simplest' is NOT to save as plain text. This scraps any italics, bold, or underlines that an author may choose to use for emphasis.. or any special formatting intentionally added.

    And while writing it with the web encoding in the first place seems obvious... the authors are NOT web designers. They are writing, using standard word processing software, in traditional methods of creating pages of fiction. Some of these I get from them by email, some by google docs, dropbox, or whatever... some are entered by the author into the site. The author group ranges from web designer savvy to barely happy with using word processors instead of these newfangled typewriters. So there is no ONE right answer.

    Let's assume, for the sake of basic arguments, that I have not been completely clueless while converting stories from various authors over the past year and a half and that these things are not a plea for someone to tell me how to do basic web encoding or document conversion... and are, instead, a busy schedule in which the priority is getting you a readable story despite it being far easier for me to simply say "sorry, with the busy holiday there won't be any updates."

    You're getting updates. They aren't up to the usual standard. I'm sorry. But not sorry enough to be treated like I'm clueless and need to be walked through the basics every time you find errors.
    Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
    9 years 4 months ago #10 by Sir Lee
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    • About Tidy:

    I like Tidy. I'm a big fan of Tidy. I use Tidy all the time when editing HTML stuff. But I don't really TRUST Tidy to fix stuff automatically. Because it uses pretty naive algorithms to "fix" stuff, and lots of times the "fix" is worse than the initial state.

    But Tidy is a great quick-and-dirty, very fast DETECTOR of syntax problems. Not as rigorous as a full HTML validator, but then, it's good enough for more than 90% of stuff. What I do is to run Tidy, take note of the error messages, reload the original file and fix the errors it found by hand. Rinse and repeat. (The process is made easier because the text editor I use, NoteTab, has special support for running Tidy on the file you are editing).

    Also, I should note that there are basically three flavors of Tidy going around:
    1. The original Tidy by Dave Raggett. It is very old, but you still see it around.
    2. The legacy W3C-maintained version, at Sourceforge. It's fine... if you don't want compatibility with HTML5. Otherwise, it will throw lots of errors on new HTML5 elements.
    3. The new HTML5 Tidy, with official page at www.html-tidy.org . This is modern and frequently updated. The only problem is that the download page for binaries is not really evident. It is here: binaries.html-tidy.org/
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    9 years 4 months ago #11 by Warren
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    • Plain text is not the answer. Unless you want to see the whole story as one long line that never ends. Particularly if you post it to the site using the "text" mode which shows the mark up. This is because that same mode would ignore line feeds from the story because there is no html markup telling it to line feed. On the old site, I had created a css file for the stories. Which would work great here. BUT we have to come up with a way of including that CSS file independent of the whole site's CSS or we'd be in for a world of hurt.

    Remember most of us like to think of ourselves as authors first and webmasters/forum moderators second, PHP programming is WAAAAAAAAAAY Down the list.

    There are modules and or instructions out there that will tell us just how to do it, BUT we have to find them on our own time, which cuts into real life and the life of an author.

    This site was a big jump for us and we've already stopped at least three hack attempts that I know of. Part of the process is going to have to involve us looking at things to improve CMS without installing a screen door on the submarine. If you get what I'm saying.

    :troll:
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    9 years 4 months ago #12 by Valentine
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    • Kristin Darken wrote: The 'simplest' is NOT to save as plain text. This scraps any italics, bold, or underlines that an author may choose to use for emphasis.. or any special formatting intentionally added.

    And while writing it with the web encoding in the first place seems obvious... the authors are NOT web designers. They are writing, using standard word processing software, in traditional methods of creating pages of fiction. Some of these I get from them by email, some by google docs, dropbox, or whatever... some are entered by the author into the site. The author group ranges from web designer savvy to barely happy with using word processors instead of these newfangled typewriters. So there is no ONE right answer.

    Let's assume, for the sake of basic arguments, that I have not been completely clueless while converting stories from various authors over the past year and a half and that these things are not a plea for someone to tell me how to do basic web encoding or document conversion... and are, instead, a busy schedule in which the priority is getting you a readable story despite it being far easier for me to simply say "sorry, with the busy holiday there won't be any updates."

    You're getting updates. They aren't up to the usual standard. I'm sorry. But not sorry enough to be treated like I'm clueless and need to be walked through the basics every time you find errors.


    Where's my quill pen and bottle of ink?

    And someone go kill a sheep. I need more parchment.
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    9 years 4 months ago #13 by Arcanist Lupus
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    • Valentine wrote:

    Kristin Darken wrote: The 'simplest' is NOT to save as plain text. This scraps any italics, bold, or underlines that an author may choose to use for emphasis.. or any special formatting intentionally added.

    And while writing it with the web encoding in the first place seems obvious... the authors are NOT web designers. They are writing, using standard word processing software, in traditional methods of creating pages of fiction. Some of these I get from them by email, some by google docs, dropbox, or whatever... some are entered by the author into the site. The author group ranges from web designer savvy to barely happy with using word processors instead of these newfangled typewriters. So there is no ONE right answer.

    Let's assume, for the sake of basic arguments, that I have not been completely clueless while converting stories from various authors over the past year and a half and that these things are not a plea for someone to tell me how to do basic web encoding or document conversion... and are, instead, a busy schedule in which the priority is getting you a readable story despite it being far easier for me to simply say "sorry, with the busy holiday there won't be any updates."

    You're getting updates. They aren't up to the usual standard. I'm sorry. But not sorry enough to be treated like I'm clueless and need to be walked through the basics every time you find errors.


    Where's my quill pen and bottle of ink?

    And someone go kill a sheep. I need more parchment.


    Hah! You think that you get a quill pen and an ink bottle? Here's a goose and a squid. Have fun. :evil:

    Be glad I was feeling generous, or you'd have gotten a dinosaur instead and would have to breed your own goose.
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    9 years 4 months ago #14 by Valentine
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    • Arcanist Lupus wrote:

    Valentine wrote:
    Where's my quill pen and bottle of ink?

    And someone go kill a sheep. I need more parchment.


    Hah! You think that you get a quill pen and an ink bottle? Here's a goose and a squid. Have fun. :evil:

    Be glad I was feeling generous, or you'd have gotten a dinosaur instead and would have to breed your own goose.


    I'm ahead of Elrod, I think he's still using a chisel and stone tablets. :whistle:
    Don't Drick and Drive.
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