Forum: Author Hangout

run around 18-24 chapters

with this particular story that may not work. The 'calendar' for this story ticks along at 4 week intervals as (at least in this part) are based on the sister's period cycle which happens to be the standard 28 days. 'like a Swiss clock'. That gives me 13 max chapters but there are a few intervening events that bump that up a bit. from a quick scan the chapters seem to get longer each 'month' with the inclusion of the inserted 'events'.

now there is not a complete 'vignette' for each cycle and the story starts just after the start of the school, rather than a set date of a calendar year cycling to the same period in 12 regular months, so there's room to move here and there.

The point of the question is to gauge how long a 'typical' reader's attention lasts and then give me guidelines to nip and tuck the story around those numbers.

And I believe SOL readers do not like short chapters.

This is why I asked the question but I was leaning from the other end, how long is too long. Ignore the 24k 'chapter' as it's a wall of text that I have to further break down to find where chapters can be cut in. (something I am doing right now in fact)

This is why I asked the question but I was leaning from the other end, how long is too long.

There are million+ word stories on SOL with "chapters" that are 1/4 or more of the planned length of your story.

These stories seem to be fairly popular if you go by the total download counts.

Cut the chapters where it makes sense for the story and don't worry about chapter length so much.

There are million+ word stories on SOL

Yer I don't think I could even begin to wonder about a story quite that long. I'm not saying that each chapter has to be to the letter a set length, more advice on 'tuning' the length of chapters to hopefully get a good response

And you kind of missed the point.

There are popular stories with 20,000+ word chapters.

I don't think you need to worry about your chapters being too long for readers here.

ah, ok thanks for that. I'll still try to keep the max around the 10k mark, I may need to somewhat pad the smallest chapters just to have a little continuity.

And I believe SOL readers do not like short chapters.

Has anyone told this Old Man with a Pen and his readers?
His extremely short chapters avoid the annoying message "There is more ..." and the two clicks to load the remainder of the chapter.

HM.

Most Important: 55,000 characters otherwise the chapter will have an "automatic" 2nd page.
I prefer each chapter to be just a single page. If it is going to be larger, I prefer to create a multiple chapters at My Chosen break points, not a break chosen by an algorithm.

That system is gone for a long time now. Lazeez decided that with the increased internet speeds and devices it was no longer necessary.
Just check a very long chapter like for example one from Three Square Meals by Tefler and you won't see the split that was used before, just a single long page.

Just check a very long chapter like for example one from Three Square Meals by Tefler and you won't see the split that was used before, just a single long page.

How is this with older stories – posted before Lazeez deactivated the splitting system? If chapters got split into pages when initially posted, are these page splits still there if I download these chapters now?
I guess the page splits were made during the posting process, not 'on the fly' during download; I further guess Lazeez didn't run a routine on older stories to remove the splits.

HM.

How is this with older stories – posted before Lazeez deactivated the splitting system?

There are some very old stories with long chapters that Lazeez split manually. Those stay split.

As I understand it, the automated page splitting wasn't done when the story was loaded in the database. It was done when a reader accessed the chapter.

Turn it off, no more pages.

As I understand it, the automated page splitting wasn't done when the story was loaded in the database. It was done when a reader accessed the chapter.

I thought about such an approach, but this might increase the workload on the system significantly when hundreds of downloads were performed within hours after posting the new chapter. Holding the split version for some time (hours? days?) in a cache would reduce the workload but add complexity to the system.

HM.

I thought about such an approach, but this might increase the workload on the system significantly when hundreds of downloads were performed within hours after posting the new chapter.

Another approach would be to store/cache not the split text, but the split points. The heavy lifting is in calculating where to split the text. After that, generating the split text from the raw text is relatively light weight.

that looks awful because of the large spaces between words.

Full justification works fairly well on a printed page, [...] But on computers, it tends to come out rather bad.

It still can look good, even on a small screen, but you have to insert appropriate soft hyphens (& shy;) into longer words. To do this manually correctly you need to know the hyphenation of most words. And it's a PITA to do.
I don't know if any word processor has a function to add multiple soft hyphens at the appropriate places of all
words of at least medium length.

I've done it manually by changing the width of the preview window in Calibre's editor and inserting soft hyphens where necessary.

HM.

I wonder what newspapers use. They insert hyphens all the time when squeezing reports into narrow columns, and I can't imagine they do it manually.

AJ, any word processor should be able to do this as long as its dictionary contains the word with its hyphenation, e.g. com‧fort‧ably. The narrow columns are known when the text gets formatted for printing.
The problem arises with HTML text when the browser has to fit the text into the line width of the display device.
There would be two solutions I can think of:
1 - the HTML text already contains soft (invisible) hyphens in every word, as the dots show in 'com‧fort‧ably'.
2 - the browser or eBook software has to insert the hyphen on-the-fly.

HM.

There are CSS settings to control browser hyphenation. It's set to "hyphens: manual;" by default, which means it will only insert hyphens where a ­ soft hyphen has been explicitly added. If you set it to "hyphens: auto;" it'll use the browser's hyphenation dictionary and algorithms to insert hyphens where it feels it necessary. That's browser-dependent, and the quality may vary.

Um, no.

Back in the day when men were men, PCs ran DOS, and we were reading Usenet on 80x25 text-mode screens, this may have been true, but it hasn't been in 20, 25 years at least. I mean, you'll still see it sometimes in terminal-mode stuff like Unix man pages, or stuff that was created as a flat text file and just wrapped in a modern format wrapper, but anything in any remotely modern format is not adding actual characters to the text; it's adjusting word spacing to pixel-level precision on the fly as it flows the text.

(Adding actual space characters to anything HTML-based — and practically everything is HTML-based under the hood these days — doesn't even do anything, because HTML collapses whitespace.)

The reason full justification on narrow columns so often looks crappy isn't because the system can't or isn't doing fine adjusting of word spacing. It's just because when you've got unbreakable chunks of text that are relatively long compared to the space they have to fit in, you'll frequently have situations where you've got a long word coming up next and not quite enough space to fit it on the current line, so there's a lot of whitespace left over on your current line that you've got to do something with. So you end up with a line that has a short word on the left margin and a short word on the right margin, with an unreasonably wide gap between them, and then a long word by itself on the next line.

But the thing is, it doesn't look a lot better left-justified. You just end up with your unreasonably wide whitespace on the right margin instead of between the words. It's not really full-justification problems; it's just narrow-column problems.

Hyphenation lets you avoid this situation by breaking that long word and putting part of it on the line with the short words. But then you run into the problems that browsers are often not very good at auto-hyphenation, and if you don't actually control the formatting of where you're putting your writing, you probably can't tinker with the hyphenation settings anyway.

I've been working recently on a bunch of pages that have photos and diagrams floated right so the text flows around them on the left side, and I've been running into problems because they work fine on my high-resolution laptop display, but on my tablet the gap between the left side of the image and the left margin of the page is often very narrow to non-existent. So I end up with places where I have one word next to the top corner of the image, and then the next word, which is just a bit too long for the space, is way down on the line below the image. Changing justification settings does absolutely nothing to address this. Turning on hyphenation does, because it lets you break that word that's too long for the available space and fit it in in pieces.

But the thing is, it doesn't look a lot better left-justified. You just end up with your unreasonably wide whitespace on the right margin instead of between the words.

I have to disagree. You still get the same effect with long words even on much wider "columns"

I have eyesight issues, astigmatism and extreme nearsightedness. Even on wider columns, the uneven word spacing created by fully justified text is actively uncomfortable to read. I find it much easier to read left justified text than fully justified text.

In fact, I would rather read right justified text than fully justified text.

In fact, I would rather read right justified text than fully justified text.

Yes! Especially on long paragraphs, where the ragged right edge somehow helps me track where I am in the paragraph.

@Dominions Son

In fact, I would rather read right justified text than fully justified text.

Yes! Especially on long paragraphs, where the ragged right edge somehow helps me track where I am in the paragraph.

Right justified text would have a ragged left edge. as all the text would be aligned on the right margin.

yer, been looking at this off and on, looking where to put the chapter breaks, I have about 9 or 10 I think, they're not numbered. looks like the story is going to be a lot longer than initial plans (up to 4x longer) due to new ideas coming in, I have 2 new arcs and one of them will be very long, a slow build if you will. one trouble is the time division won't work for subsequent parts as the reason for that has been solved, though it is still important for the first arc.

I don't know if subsequent 'years' will get the same word and chapter count but I'd like to think I can keep it up. I may ask for pointers here and there as those develop.