[seabream]

Does anyone know a way to preserve the ordering of the Character, Relationship, and Freeform Tags from AO3 when doing an FFDL download? Some people use the convention where more central characters and relationships get listed first, supporting characters and relationships second, but they get alphabetised by the time they go into the columns. Likewise, some Freeform Tag strings are meant to be read in order, but appear alphabetised on the titlepage, logpage, and columns. I have looked, but if there's a setting I can toggle for them individually or something like that, I missed it. I can save the epub from the site and transfer the AO3 titlepage (which uses the site ordering) into the FFDL epub, but that's pretty cumbersome. Likewise, I can create a long text field to manually copy the information into, but again, cumbersome.

In reply to the upthread question/discussion when someone asked about what other people do with AO3 tags: I prefer to preserve as much information as practical in its original form (because what forms and conventions people use also communicates something about what communities they come from and what type of story this is likely to be), while maintaining a separate listing for searchability. So while I preserve all the AO3 freeform tags, and sometimes the original form of character and relationship tags, in custom columns for that purpose, I standardise and cull them for the main Tags column and for my hierarchical-by-fandom character and relationship custom columns. I rarely preserve the non-standard fandom markers (for instance, some pairings themselves are considered fandoms if they get big enough in a given community of writers, particularly if they are crossovers of different original works) because I'm trying to limit column numbers and they don't come up often enough in the works I read.