Saturday, July 15, 2006

Posting Frustration

After the long ordeal of editing I put Chocolatelova and Sapphirefly through, I can't figure out how ff upload works. I can't format ch1 exactly how it looks in my original document, and it makes me very frustrated.

The problem is with line breaks. I need multiple line breaks to create visual distance between scenes. I tried using its shift-enter command, using its regular enter command, editing html for more breaks, uploading the document as an html page instead, and they all look fine on the preview screen, until I save changes and then the document reverts back to the format that ff prefers, evidently. When it does this, the shift-enter also takes off the ending html bold tag, so the whole document becomes bolded. Someone on their programming team screwed up...

It is mind-bloggling how popular ff is despite its faults. Another example: when the user survey came out last month, I thought to myself, hey, that's cool, maybe we can actually get a rating system more sophisticated than number of reviews. But instead of any suggestions for writers, it asked if I preferred if they develop a fanart section.

What.

Why don't you ask me about a better editing system? Or better forums? Or better ways to link users and give webpage credits in your fic?

Okay, I'm not exactly being fair to ff. They have done well to cater to the general public, and has made fanfiction even more popular. I'm just frustrated that a seemingly simple function is fraught with problems.

Too braindead to tweak the fic presentation further tonight. Tomorrow is always another day.

2 comments:

Sapphirefly said...

On the bright side - fanfiction.net is free!

jomiel said...

I now have chapters with a lot of - between lines :P