Current Size: 100%
Personal techniques to make a fic more readable.
Posted on: Sat, 01/23/2010 - 21:31
Offline
Personal techniques to make a fic more readable.
After several years of reading fanfics, I've found myself abandoning stories due to one thing or another that irritated me so badly that I couldn't finish it, despite enjoying it otherwise. As a result, I've developed a few ways to get around these things so I can enjoy the story without wanting to crack my skull with a keyboard. I thought I'd share these and see if any of you guys have come up with some good ideas that I could use myself as well.
1) Stylish plugin on Firefox to fix FFN layout. I cannot stand the default. The ads are highly annoying, and I prefer larger, light-colored text on a dark background for the sake of my eyes. I *highly* recommend this thread (http://forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?t=6474) if any of these annoyances also apply to you. I also have a working stylish code for SIYE (and FFN, but there are plenty of those) that uses a black background and green text if anyone wants it, just ask for it in this thread. Note that you will probably have to do some searching in the thread to find the perfect layout for you.
2) Jarte to avoid SPaG or horribly annoying misspells of common HP terms/names. Jarte is a Wordpad program I've found that accomplishes what I need (I don't have Word itself, so it may work better). The main things I use it for are to get a black background and larger text to save my eyes (I usually only use this on non-FFN/SIYE stories due to #1) and to correct all those very annoying minor errors (such as McGongall, Sevrus, "God!" instead of "Merlin!", etc.
I also use it to spellcheck before I ever start reading, and to format some parts better (italics for letters, spells, and such). In general, I've found reading those edge-of-readability stories alot easier this way. Just use the replace, find, and spellcheck functions to do what I've described. A 200k+ story can have all this done in about 5-10 minutes once you get the hang of it, and saves you a couple of hours frustration. I will also save the file when I'm done if it's one of my favorite stories to my own personal library, just in case I want to enjoy it later on and it's been taken down.
So, anyone got any techniques of their own? I know at least one person's mentioned using Mobi's pocket reader or something along those lines.
Comments
My only technique in these instances is the back button.
My only technique in these instances is the back button.
Same here. If I wanted to correct mistakes the author made, I would volunteer to be one of their betas but I only have so much time. If I had a time turner, well...
A fish without a bicycle cannot contemplate his navel.
Well, the idea behind it is more to avoid your own personal pet peeves rather than to correct terrible writing. Occasionally you'll come across the story that has that repetitive, tiny thing that distracts the hell out of you while reading. Stuff like Parvarti instead of Parvati, A/Ns in the midst of text (which you skip to and delete before reading), capitalization errors, or formatting (like italics for spells), and other such things.
I realize everyone is probably not as anal retentive while reading as I am, but I suspect that there's at least a few of you that are, which is why I posted.
I do sometimes run the spell-checker in Word (with a HP dictionary) to catch canon misspellings. That's about as far as I've gone, though.
I've never really considered doing anything along those lines. If the author doesn't care enough about their story to make it readable, why should I?
As for the style stuff I don't see a need. ff.net gives you a considerable amount of control over how the text is displayed including a dark background option. SIYE has several themes to choose from.
As for the ads, my hosts file makes the ad servers unreachable so the ads on most sites including ff.net never show up.
-SC
After several years of reading fanfics, I've found myself abandoning stories due to one thing or another that irritated me so badly that I couldn't finish it, despite enjoying it otherwise. As a result, I've developed a few ways to get around these things so I can enjoy the story without wanting to crack my skull with a keyboard. I thought I'd share these and see if any of you guys have come up with some good ideas that I could use myself as well.
1) Stylish plugin on Firefox to fix FFN layout. I cannot stand the default. The ads are highly annoying, and I prefer larger, light-colored text on a dark background for the sake of my eyes. I *highly* recommend this thread (http://forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?t=6474) if any of these annoyances also apply to you. I also have a working stylish code for SIYE (and FFN, but there are plenty of those) that uses a black background and green text if anyone wants it, just ask for it in this thread. Note that you will probably have to do some searching in the thread to find the perfect layout for you.
...
So is the Sylish Plugin like "user CSS"? ...checking... OK, that's what it's doing, it's helping you to create your own CSS style and FireFox will use that over any other CSS given, so you can use that to force a dark background, light fonts, specific size of fonts, etc. It's nice of them to make that easy on you.
You should definitely install the "AdBlockPlus" plugin, which will get rid of the annoying banner at the top & bottom that FF.net does. If not, there is a single line you can put in your "hosts" file so the server that gives the ads can't be found and they will be skipped (and the page will load a LOT faster).
Personally, for any stories I save off to read offline, I run it thru a custom Perl script I wrote that strips out all the "junk" and leaves me with just the text of the story.
For the SIYE and fanficauthors.net sites, the "printer friendly" formats are good enough for me to use without change.
I tried to read a story here from Metafic the other day on my tablet and got REALLY frustrated. There was some element that was forcing a very wide width that made the page unreadable. When I get the time and motivation, I'll figure out what that is and create a good suggestion on how to fix that, and send that to Dino in the hopes that he does it. :)
Kevin
. . . send things like that to me. :)