Mirage_GSM wrote:On Spacing:
The problem just came up back again in a recent fic, and it seems we didn't cover this topic in this thread yet - or I've been using the wrong keywords...
Anyway, for better readability a story posted to the forum should use paragraphs rather than simply one giant wall of text.
To be more precise one should use a double line break every time the speaking/acting character changes. You don't really need single line breaks at all.
I have another solution to the same problem, one I was forced to come up with because in my current format, blank lines mean something. In particular, they mean the "single-focus omniscient narrator" is about to leap from one character's shoulder to another. The solution is to format the way I'd format a normal document: with an indent at the beginning of each paragraph.
Now there's an inherent problem, in that the board software strips out what it perceives as extraneous spaces, and it doesn't honor tabs either. Those are the two normal ways to indent. I tried non-breaking spaces. Oddly, that worked on the first line after a double break, but not in a continuous form such as this. My initial solution was to create a transparent graphic of the proper size and insert it at the beginning of every paragraph. Since this required hosting said graphic somewhere else, this method was less than reliable for me, and impossible for some. It took me quite a while to come up with an idea that should have hit me long before.
Thin spaces. Unicode U+2009.
The forum software doesn't recognize these as spaces, so it doesn't try to strip them out. Also, it does not seem that they have issues with variable pitch fonts (which is pretty much everything you'd want to use) unless you're justifying text on both the left and right — and if you could do that here, you could also do proper indents. The down side is that because they are
thin spaces, you need to chain up a fair number of them to accomplish your goal. All of these paragraphs, for example, are preceded by eight of them.
This line is flush left (not indented).
This is indented with just one ThSp.
Two ThSp.
This line is flush left (not indented).
Four ThSp. Now we're actually getting somewhere.
Eight ThSp, like are all the paragraphs above. I consider this the equivalent of a quarter-inch indent.
This line is flush left (not indented).
Twelve.
Sixteen. I consider this the equivalent of a half-inch indent.
This line is flush left (not indented).
You get the point.
Now how do you enter these? I have my keyboard layout mapping AltGr + Space to Thin Space, but the only standard layout that does this natively, I believe, is Swedish/Finnish. On a Windows machine, you could hold down Alt and punch out '2009' on the keypad, then release Alt. This gets you
one of them. This is obviously a pain in the ass. You could copypaste them from another document, including this one. I've found that overall, the easiest solution is to substitute something else until you are ready to post, then do a Find-and-Replace operation. If you are typing purely in English, this puts the
`~ key to good use. Just start every paragraph with
` and replace them at the end. If you have
`~ set as a dead key, or don't have one at all (as would be the case in most other language layouts), you'll have to figure out something that works for you. If you have the paragraph symbol
¶ available, that seems like an obvious candidate. It also doesn't have to be just one character. You could start every paragraph with
=! if you wanted, provided you have no other reason to ever type
=! in the course of your work.
