Formatting Issues?

cu-kid9 · October 28, 2007

I was re-reading an old story of mine the other day and, while scanning through it, realized that many of the things that were supposed to be italicized or centered, weren't.

Now, when I had originally published the story, all of these things were fine -I know because I'm just a wee bit obsessive-compulsive when it comes to how my stories look online. Now, I'm faced with the decision of either going back in to edit every chapter and changing all the html codes so that it will look the way it's supposed to, or leaving it to look sloppy.

I've noticed some other strange things: namely \'s before apostrophe's and italics that were definitely not there when I posted a story. Is this a problem that anyone else has come across with stories that have been published for a while?

Solaris · October 28, 2007

I hadn't seen the \'s in stories in many years, usually happens in the titles of the stories, never the stories themselves.

Weird.

If they reappear after you edit them all out, then report back, stating which story it is and we'll have the techs take a look at the coding of the story to see if it is your coding or maybe it could be something else.

Beth

xax · October 28, 2007

Oh, the \' and \" thing was totally my fault. Sorry about that D:. I rewrote one of the cleaner functions before looking at the rest of the program flow and etc etc etc, yeah. My fault. Sorry! I noticed it a few days ago, but I don't have direct access to the site's code yet, so I couldn't fix it. However, it seems to be fixed now, likely because Manta saw & fixed it. It would have appeared on pretty much every story, and now that it's fix, it shouldn't be showing up anywhere. (But please contact me if you see it anywhere!)

Regarding italics & centering: The only thing I know that could do something like that would be one of the outstanding bugs that's been around forever, the dreaded stuttering bug. If you could link me to a story where it's happened, I could probably take a closer look and see what's causing it.

cu-kid9 · October 28, 2007

This is the story I noticed it in:

Revelations

The italics are fine when they fall within a block of text, but I noticed that if it's a whole section of text that is supposed to be italicized it isn't working. I fixed some of it in the first chapter, but I haven't had a chance to see if it's happening in the other chapters. I don't know what to do about the centering.

Nana666 · October 29, 2007

Wait a minute. I see those \' nearly everywhere, on review pages and on a few stories. Also I see weird words all the time, like two words merged together. Well, it hasn't happened to my story, but I saw other places. And one author has more than sentences missing from their stories. I couldn't contact them actually to see if they knew about it but I know from the reviews that what used to be on the story and what is there now is different. Well, for all I know the author could simply had edited things out of the stories, but I can't be sure.

I was wondering if it does it have to do with browser and character encoding.

Edited October 29, 2007 by Nana666

cu-kid9 · October 29, 2007

I was wondering if it does it have to do with browser and character encoding.

I think sometimes it might. I read a story on here a while ago where I had to change my character encoding to Korean so I could read it without weird symbols -and, fortunately, the author let everyone know in her A/N's that we needed to switch the encoding. I'm pretty sure that the \ thing is a recent occurrence, though.

xax · October 29, 2007

I was wrong again (goooo me), the \' problem is still not fixed, but once it is fixed it should go away in all stories automatically, unless you've edited the chapter in question and not manually fixed it. I can't fix it myself (no direct access to the code), but I've informed Manta about it so it should be fixed within the next few days (she has RL stuff happening right now, so she's kind of busy).

The AFFN code doesn't do anything special with encoded text, so if a story is uploaded with an uncommon encoding or if a story uses certain characters (high unicode, etc) it could potentially display weirdly. That'll go onto my to-fix list.

That "two words merged together" bug Nana666 mentioned is the dreaded stuttering bug, and it's been around AFFN since the beginning. It's really annoying and basically my first priority (after fixing various security issues, that is) because it slowly makes everything unreadable. And e xample of the bug in action would be something like the sentence "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" being changed into "Lorem ipslor slor sit amet".

Still no clue about the missing italics, sorry.

October 30, 2007

Maybe we could all use a "quick fix it" tutorial in the 'find/replace function of some editors and in some popular programs that would help us to straighten out our stories' formatting. For example, in DreamWeaver. I'm sure that there are other programs out there that could handle it. I'm going to need to go back and redo everything then repost.

If this is to be a continuous problem, we need to be given ways to correct them when they occur. Because the site programming is messing things up and the site techs can't possibly fix all of the fics, I think that we deserve a helping hand, ne?

Just an idea that popped into my head because I forgot how to use my dreamweaver and there is no way that I am ever hand coding again.

I know it isn't the fault of current techs. This bug has been around since the first big crash during Ayla's tenure. So, I'm not bitching at anyone. Just need a little help and I'm sure that everyone else would bow at your feet if you could hand out a few morsels.

Snow

cu-kid9 · October 30, 2007

The italics thing isn't really as big a deal as the \. I don't understand it either, though, because when I go back in to look at the chapter under 'edit' the html is showing that those sections should be italicized (you know it has ). I have always had problems with this, but only when the italics fall within text -and then whatever is supposed to be italicized is surrounded by which I have to go back and change...which may just be me doing something stupid

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to search for the problem with the backslashes. If I really feel the need, I can go in and fix the italic stuff myself

DemonGoddess · October 30, 2007

Are you uploading as a text or html file?

for formatting-

=bold

=italics

xax · October 30, 2007

Are you uploading as a text or html file?
for formatting-

=bold

=italics

*cough* The fancy 'semantic' version of is .

cu-kid9: If your tags are being turned into tags there's probably some code wizardry going on at some point... I haven't gotten a chance to look at the submission & editing code yet, but this has gotten confusing enough for me to take a look soon to see if I can give a more conclusive answer.

snowfall: Well, I assume most people upload their stories having already formatted it the way they like, so a rich-text editor (something like TinyMCE, I'm assuming) would only be useful for fixing corruption (as in missing-tags corruption-- as I said above, the \' stuff should vanish altogether once it's fixed in the code). I'd like to stop the corruption altogether, both whatever this tags thing is (if it is a bug after all) and the stuttering thing.

But then again, as a programmer and web designer I tend to underestimate how easy HTML is to pick up, so maybe a text formatter would be a good idea. At any rate, it'd be a seperate concern, because I don't think it's fair to have the users fix the techs' mistakes.

DemonGoddess · October 30, 2007

urkkk you're right xax...sorry just got off a 13 hour sleep jag...makes my head fuzzy

cu-kid9 · October 31, 2007

I upload everything as htmls.

I figured the would be something that was wrong on my end. If I'm working on another computer and using Word, everything is fine when I upload. At home, I use OpenOffice, so I just figured that it was my program that was messing up since this has been happening since I started posting here -and I just go back and edit the chapter and correct everything. The sections where a new paragraph has started with something italicized has always worked and has never been a problem until recently.

Thanks again for looking into this.

xax · November 2, 2007

Okay, so I've gotten confirmation from Manta that the \' issue has been fixed, so it should no longer be showing up in any stories. If you see any remaining slash-related weirdness, please note me or reply to this thread.

madlodger · November 9, 2007

The \' issue is still hapenning. Not in all stories, but I just saw it inside of the story and on the review board of the same story as well. You guys might want to take a second look into this issue

Edit: I've seen \" as well

Edited November 10, 2007 by madlodger

DemonGoddess · November 10, 2007

It is being worked on.

xax · November 11, 2007

Okay. okay.

Evidently the fix was applied to the test site but not the actual real archive site. gg us, we are so competent. The patches for both the various backslash errors and for the original error cu-kid9 reported (missing HTML tags) are up on the live site now. Hopefully, this should be the last time this ever happens. If you were experiencing textual glitches such as backslashed quotes or random > characters in place of formatting tags, they should be gone now. If you do see any errors like that on the site, please contact me or manta2g so we can get them fixed (again).

cu-kid9 · November 11, 2007

Not to drone on about this...but does this mean that those things italicized that became unitalicized should return to being that way? (Who else found that confusing?)

I think maybe I am confused about this whole thing because, if I look at something I posted and I see something formatted wrong, I go back to check on it. The code in the edit screen looks like this: and yet, the text that that follows it is not italicized within the story. I have to go back and put the around everything.

Sorry to keep asking about these things! And thanks again for working on it!

DemonGoddess · November 11, 2007

Yes, that's what that means, that by making that correction upload, it SHOULD fix the format errors throughout the archive. Yer not being a drone, just thorough, and asking for clarification. Nothing wrong with that at all.

xax · November 11, 2007

Not to drone on about this...but does this mean that those things italicized that became unitalicized should return to being that way? (Who else found that confusing?)
I think maybe I am confused about this whole thing because, if I look at something I posted and I see something formatted wrong, I go back to check on it. The code in the edit screen looks like this: and yet, the text that that follows it is not italicized within the story. I have to go back and put the around everything.

Sorry to keep asking about these things! And thanks again for working on it!

Yeah, it should be showing up-- there was a change to the code to prevent people from using javascript to steal people's login cookies (among other issues), and one of the side-effects was that it stripped out all the style data for your story. We've got a final update that should fix the lingering side-effects (your case is kind of unusual because most people use tags without any styling, which is why it was the last issue we noticed), so within a day or two your formatting should show up again if it's not already.

I'm sorry this has been such a tangle to resolve, and thank you for your patience!

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