Forum: Author Hangout

Just cause it hasn't been mentioned in a while, I thought I'd toss up a technical tip. If you're a writer, especially if you ever plan to post your stories to a website or post them in ebooks, you'll want to use Styles.

Any Word Processor uses Styles, though they may call it something else. They're a way of defining how different paragraphs are formatted, document wide. If you format (center, italicize and bold) individual words/sentences, then sometimes your choice will be overuled (especially if you bold or itialicize the first word of a paragraph). This has only happened to me when formatting books, but it was really annoying.

In html, you can either use a single file (CSS) to define your styles, or include it in each file (I use a LINK command). For ePub file creation, it's easiest to use a single file for the entire book and include the style definitions in the beginning.

I generally have a standard set of definitions (h1, h2, Normal, Centered, CenterBold, FirstParagraph (without any indentation), etc.).

I'd include a sample, but the Forum's design doesn't allow the coding necessary to show it. However, you can examine my CSS code here. You don't need the CSS code, but the Style setup and the paragraph types.

Note: SOL does NOT support styles, so it won't help you here.

CW,

Technically, SOL doesn't support styles. However, I write in Libre Office using styles for headers and special paragraphs etc. They easily convert to html and to e-pubs (via Calibre). For SOL I take the html copy and then use the Find and Replace option of my editor to change the different html style tag into the relevant equivalent of the SOL Text Tags. Thus the H1 becomes {c}{red} and the H2 becomes {c}{blue} and so on. It's a little more work than using the SOL conversion wizard but gives me a result I like the look of.

I try to craft stuff in essentially plaintext to make it more portable later. My Word Processor is actually a rather old version of WordPerfect, I think it is from before the days when Styles became a thing. You can certainly set whatever formatting you like but those get set as discreet codes that are easily located, much like ye olde HTML.

I know that MS Word has styles or whatever, I always have to change the paragraph formatting stuff from the default because I don't like their default, and while making global style changes is fairly easy, making a change to one small section of text only can be maddening.

I'm not overly familiar with ebook formats but my understanding is they operate much the same way, setting the styles correctly is important.

Overall I think it's best to learn enough to handle the necessary coding or stick as close to plain test as possible.