Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Technical Help and How To's Archive Fanfic Reformatting Tutorial

Several people have mentioned how they reformat fanfic in Microsoft Word from the archive for more efficient printing and/or easier reading. And several more people have mentioned that they don't know how. Someone taught me years ago, so I thought I'd share the knowledge.



(Above is two different ways to do the same thing.)









Note: This story's format does not include a space after hard returns. Some stories that are archived do have a space. For those stories that do have it, put nothing in the "replace with" section.




From here you can change font, adjust margins and font size. Personally, when I print fic, I use 0.5" margins and 8pt Times font--just about as many words as you can fit on a page.

Sara

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Ines

Oh, my gosh. That was so wonderful!! Thank you.

Now, one of these days, you are going to have to tell us how you got those pretty pictures.

For some reason, I don't have a 'Paragraph' icon on my tool bar. I decided to see what would happen by going to the next step (the changing the options step), and it worked fine.

Man, I don't know how you read 8 point, though. You must have hawk vision!!

Screencaps you can do either by holding down the Alt key while you press the PrtScn/SysRq button (it's usually up past the backspace bar, near the F keys), or to get the whole screen instead of just the one window, you can do Alt, Shift and PrtScn/SysRq.

Then, just paste them into an image program, save 'em, upload 'em somewhere like Photobucket, and they're ready to post.

I used to have people tell me that they printed out Caped Fear in tiny print - and then used a magnifying glass to read it.

LabRat

If you are trying to save paper and not ink, I would recommend using columns.

I usually use 4 columns, with line be the columns and a 0.1" margin. This way I was able to shrink Masques down from 335 pages to 223, with very tiny outside margins.

The best way to find out how small a margin you can get away with is to set the left and right margins to 0" and let Word fix it.

More than 4 columns gets a little harder to read and you don't save that much paper.

For Masques
# of Columns/# of pages
1/335
2/254
3/231
4/223
5/221

After 5 columns, you start to actually loose ground!

Now, if there are poems or songs in the fic, then you should use 2 columns because most stanzas are longer than 4 column margin.

Front and back printing saves paper too.

James

I was thinking...

If anyone is interested in such a thing, I could code a little application that would batch process all the .txt files in a folder and reformat them properly. (ie: remove line breaks and resave in .TXT format which you could do whatever you like with later on.)

Of course it would work only on PC.
(yeah, I know, coming from a Mac user, this is borderline ridiculous! I don't know how to code for Mac... mea culpa!)

Mind you, I'm caught up with real life and the whole NaNoWriMo thing right now (30000 words and still going strong) but this doesn't require a lot of work, so I could still have that done rather quickly.

What can I say... I live for one-click solutions! (automating things is a big part of what I do for a living, actually *lol*)

Oh, that is so funny. That’s what you call saving ink and paper to the max.

Thanks for the tip, Darcy.

D8A, I’ve used two columns. I personally wouldn’t want to use more than that, but when I do that I print it in landscape. It turns out quite nicely and rather looks like the pages of a book. And I always do front and back printing, but that can get tricky if you want Side one to be page 1 and side 2 to be page 2. I've done that, but I can't remember how now. I believe it depends on the printer. I usually print the first half of a fic, turn the stack over and print the second half. It can be done so all you have to do is turn the whole the whole stack over - no reshuffling, but again I believ it's different with every printer.


Yes, Lara. I'd be interested in that, if it wasn't too time consuming for you. Considering that I just learned how to reformat them, I have lots of fics saved in TXT format.

I'm done coding the application (wee!) I'm going to post it in a sec.

Okay, now I just came across an older fic on the archive that has indented paragraphs and no spacing between paragraphs. The indented paragraphs come up with little arrows something like: ->. Now how do I do that?

If it's a straight arrow (as opposed to an arrow with a little curvy tail... though I'm not entirely sure there's a difference ), that's the symbol for "tab". In the find and replace function, it's represented by "^t" (without the quotes). Hope that works!

And btw, can you tell me which fic that is so I can let LaraMoon know about it for her little program?

Sara

Thanks. It's In the Beginning by BB Medos.

It's got the straight arrows at the beginning of the paragraph. I came across another, but I totally have no idea what it was, that has the curvy arrows at the end of the line - like where the P sign for paragraphs usually is.

Okay, I'm having vague memories now of the curvy-tailed arrow being a "manual line break". I can't be sure, though, until I find a story with the curvy one in it to check.

I made more pictures to show how you find the text representations for certain characters.

This is the same "Find and Replace" function from the above tutorial. Click on "More".



Click on "Special" to get a list of what special characters can be located (and thus replaced) within the text:




Sara (who really shouldn't enjoy this so much when she's got homework waiting for her :p )

I'll add the tabulations as an option to my utility, when I recompile it to add the removal of extra spaces at the end of the lines (ie: causing some words to have two spaces between them when concatenating lines).

I'll check for the manual breaks too and anything else I can add as an option. I've found a bug as well, but you don't want to know what that is. <g>

'ya know... this place is really a godsend for me. Brought back the joy of writing for one, but coding this little app brought back the fun of programming as well. I used to get requests for things and would turn them down cause I plain didn't feel like it - stuff I would have been paid for - and here I go whipping up this little thing in flash, just for the heck of it, and I'm even sitting here wondering how I can make it even better and I'm all excited about that, too.

...where have you guys been all my life?

When I print out fanfic, I usually just print it from the txt file on the internet. To save paper, I go to file > print > preferences (i think that's what it would be called in english) and set the number of pages per sheet of paper to 4. But, well, that's just lazy me not wanting to go through a lot of trouble and just wanting to read the fic

I knew of this technic to make archived stories more readable and hasn't someone also posted their own application to do it automatically on input text files?

Because this can be done way more comfortable I made a small Greasemonkey Script which goes by the name Autoparse.LnC-Archive.Stories . All it does is change the links to the textfiles from http://*something.txt to http://dosomething/?url=http://*something.txt ; it is a script that modifies the website your browser shows you, the archive remains completely unchanged, instead the text file is relayed and modified by a server script a friend of mine was kind enough to upload for me.

This story is Dandello's latest story in the archive, "Leather", and a good example how the thing works. The reason why the text is so big is my laptop which has a huge resolution that makes fonts terribly small and this way I can lean back and read comfortably without hurting my eyes You only need CTRL & + or CTRL & - or CTRL & mouse-wheel to change the size.

How to install it: You'll only be able to use that if you have the Mozilla Firefox browser installed on your system. Greasemonkey is the addon that is needed for my script to work, just click "Install now" and restart the browser once it is done. After that restart, go to userscripts.org and click on "Install this script" to add it to your browser. Open any list of stories on lncfanfic.com archive and the txt-links should now be changed.

The script can be disabled by right-clicking on the monkey-head-icon on the status-bar and unchecking it.

Oooh! awesome little bit of coding. That's going to make reading stories on my iPod (touch) a heck of a lot easier. Thanks!!

I've got a keyboard with a zoom bar on it, so if I'm reading fic in the archive and want the text to be bigger and fill the screen (and this is in IE), all I have to do is hold the CTRL key and use the roller on the mouse.

Of course, that only works at work, where I actually HAVE a mouse, instead of a trackball like I have at home.