The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[ownedbycats]

Sort of related, AO3, authors who put a zillion different oneshots, multiple unrelated fandoms, in one single work. Even worse is when they don't label the chapters!

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I don't. I just don't want to read it, even if it's important.

I figure that's on the author. They know that a lot of people won't ever see an anthology or short story, so if they make a novella or short story critical to understanding the next book in a series that's a mistake on their part.

Most authors seem to do a good job of keeping critical information in the main-line books. Background or side quests or similar things are what they put in the short works.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

I figure that's on the author. They know that a lot of people won't ever see an anthology or short story, so if they make a novella or short story critical to understanding the next book in a series that's a mistake on their part.

Most authors seem to do a good job of keeping critical information in the main-line books. Background or side quests or similar things are what they put in the short works.

Yes, that's my experience too. So far I haven't encountered a series where I've felt I've missed something between the main novels.

[DNSB]

I tend to read those interstitial stories when I run across them but they've seldom been important to the series. No changes in canon, no major new characters being added. For the most part, they tend to concentrate on relatively minor characters to fill in their story lines mentioned in the main series. I enjoy collections of short stories such as the Grantville Gazette/1632 & Beyond books even if the stories there seldom mentioned the major characters in more than a passing reference. If they hadn't existed, I would still have read the 1632/Ring of Fire series.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

How would you know it's not important to the series?

In the comic Legion of Super-Heroes the first part of "The Great Darkness Saga" (one of the greatest stories with the team) began as a short backup story that might have seemed inconsequential at that time.

[Buckaroo]

I haven't read the entire 250-page thread, so this has almost certainly been brought up before, but just in case: There is a spot in Hell reserved for whoever decided that it is now an acceptable formatting convention to denote paragraph breaks with an empty line space rather than with an indent. I never, ever saw this before my reading became primarily e-books. Sure, I can change it in Calibre, but not without the risk of damaging other formatting within the book - i.e. section breaks that *also* use blank lines. And in any case, I shouldn't *have* to.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo

I haven't read the entire 250-page thread, so this has almost certainly been brought up before, but just in case: There is a spot in Hell reserved for whoever decided that it is now an acceptable formatting convention to denote paragraph breaks with an empty line space rather than with an indent. I never, ever saw this before my reading became primarily e-books. Sure, I can change it in Calibre, but not without the risk of damaging other formatting within the book - i.e. section breaks that *also* use blank lines. And in any case, I shouldn't *have* to.

That's been an argument in typography for a lot of years. I find either one acceptable as long as the usage is consisten. I prefer the indent to indicate a new paragraph on ebooks I personally format. I dislike the books where you get both an indent and a blank line and I reach near hatred for those books where both are used but inconsistently.

Various style guides will give you different information and even disagreement on the size of the indent. One of my niblings is currently working on a doctoral thesis and the university specifies a blank line as a paragraph separator.

One place where you will often deal with blank lines is on web pages where adding a blank line is much easier than modifying the CSS.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo

I haven't read the entire 250-page thread, so this has almost certainly been brought up before, but just in case: There is a spot in Hell reserved for whoever decided that it is now an acceptable formatting convention to denote paragraph breaks with an empty line space rather than with an indent. I never, ever saw this before my reading became primarily e-books. Sure, I can change it in Calibre, but not without the risk of damaging other formatting within the book - i.e. section breaks that *also* use blank lines. And in any case, I shouldn't *have* to.

Yes, that's annoying.

BTW, you can change it without the risk of damaging other formatting by editing the css in the calibre editor or Sigil. That's what some of us do.

[Buckaroo]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I dislike the books where you get both an indent and a blank line and I reach near hatred for those books where both are used but inconsistently.

Ugh. I've dealt with a couple of those recently, too.

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Yes, that's annoying.

BTW, you can change it without the risk of damaging other formatting by editing the css in the calibre editor or Sigil. That's what some of us do.

Good to know, thanks!

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

you can change it without the risk of damaging other formatting by editing the css in the calibre editor or Sigil.

This assumes that the CSS is sane. Buckaroo's example is CSS where potentially the same method is used for both paragraph skips and scene breaks, in which case blindly converting line skips to indents will destroy scene breaks. Editing complex and/or nutty CSS can be a ton of work.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

This assumes that the CSS is sane. Buckaroo's example is CSS where potentially the same method is used for both paragraph skips and scene breaks, in which case blindly converting line skips to indents will destroy scene breaks. Editing complex and/or nutty CSS can be a ton of work.

Why is CSS so complicated? I thought the idea of it was to make formatting of HTML documents simple and consistent. I've looked at CSS and it seems overly complicated and confusing with a syntax that is different from HTML.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

This assumes that the CSS is sane. Buckaroo's example is CSS where potentially the same method is used for both paragraph skips and scene breaks, in which case blindly converting line skips to indents will destroy scene breaks. Editing complex and/or nutty CSS can be a ton of work.

Of course I didn't mean blindly converting anything. In most books there is a difference between the code for paragraph spacing and the code for section breaks. It will be a ton of work only if there is no difference between the two at all, but that's rare.

Speaking of nutty css, I just finished editing one of the worst examples of this. I have no idea how they formatted the book (just typing everything in by hand, without using any styles or rules?), because there were several hundred different rules for ordinary paragraphs, section breaks, blockquotes and so on - each one had slightly different margins (for example, one paragraph had a bottom margin 5pt, another 6pt; a blockquote had left and right margins 15pt, another 16pt, still another 15pt left and 20pt right, etc. etc. A total madhouse), so they had to be edited manually one by one, no bulk search/replace or regex. Took me two days. Grrr.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

Why is CSS so complicated?

Because everyone thinks their way is best, and so we have a thousand different ways to accomplish something.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

Why is CSS so complicated? I thought the idea of it was to make formatting of HTML documents simple and consistent. I've looked at CSS and it seems overly complicated and confusing with a syntax that is different from HTML.

HTML is used for creating web pages. CSS is used to define how the the pages look. Totally different tasks.

To me, the syntax of CSS is not that confusing though as it has been added to in the different version, it has gotten more complex. But then if you look at how HTML has changed over the years, it's not that much better. Compare the simplicity of Tim Berners-Lee's first web page to a modern web page with it's masses of code attempting to make a web page look somewhat the same across multiple browsers on multiple display devices using HTML5.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Sort of related, AO3, authors who put a zillion different oneshots, multiple unrelated fandoms, in one single work. Even worse is when they don't label the chapters!

Yep. That's not good. I know some authors do things like Patreon, anthologies, other websites, graphic novels, etc.

I actually hate graphic novels that are part of a series that are supposed to be novels and/or short stories.