Fanfic formats

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Which text format is the most appropriate for reading fanfics?

Notepad Text (*.txt)
3
20%
Rich Text Format (*.rtf)
9
60%
MS Word Document (*.doc)
2
13%
HTML (*.html)
0
No votes
Adobe Acrobat (*.pdf)
1
7%
Other Formats
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 15
Dagdamor

Fanfic formats

Post by Dagdamor » Fri Apr 15, 2005 4:54 am

Maybe this problem isn't so important as I see it, but anyway. ;)

Please notice the question was "for reading", because I think writer always should choose format that will be most convenient for readers. TXT format seems to be the most popular here, but without line-breaks it's unsuitable for reading from browser, and with line-breaks it usually becomes unsuitable for printing. Also there are no standards for the line width (in characters).
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Re: Fanfic formats

Post by Meteorite » Fri Apr 15, 2005 5:27 am

Dagdamor wrote: Also there are no standards for the line width (in characters).
I have had trouble with that myself.

I would like to suggest here around 80 characters per line for those formats which do not use Word Wrap.
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Re: Fanfic formats

Post by Hellfish » Fri Apr 15, 2005 7:40 am

In my experience, rtf has all the features you'll need and  most everybody can read em.
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Re: Fanfic formats

Post by gkscotty » Fri Apr 15, 2005 5:10 pm

I generally prefer to use RTF and txt.

And I believe it's traditional to wrap txt files at 72 charaters.
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Re: Fanfic formats

Post by Meteorite » Fri Apr 15, 2005 5:18 pm

gkscotty wrote: And I believe it's traditional to wrap txt files at 72 charaters.
Ah.  Even better.
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Re: Fanfic formats

Post by Bothead » Sat Apr 16, 2005 7:42 pm

I'm used to reading the txt formats. Notepad documents also take up less space than Word documents.
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Re: Fanfic formats

Post by archonix » Sat Apr 16, 2005 10:14 pm

For preference, rtf, thought txt is also useable. rtf is one of those ISO standards, so no company can get a stranglehold on it. Chances are, if there's a computer of any kind out there, someone has written an rtf reader for it.
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Re: Fanfic formats

Post by SirMustapha » Wed Apr 20, 2005 7:12 pm

Rich Text, for me. Though I think fiction in script format gets away with TXT just fine - it's easier to read with NotePad, or whatever. You could use a monospace font in a RTF file, too, but I can't see why.

PDF is a b*tch, DOC is MS, HTML is... well, awesome if you're writing fiction with hyperlinks. :)
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