New Features for Fan Works
Just about every medium that Fan Works exploits is getting something that's going to add to the way we do things around here. This sticky exists as a general announcement and selection of tutorials for these new features.
Fan Fiction: Paragraph Formatting
Over the years, Fan Fiction has suffered in many respects; particularly on the internet forum medium. While only time & experience can solve such miseries as novice writing skills and indecipherable grammar, other problems can, in fact, be solved with new software. In this case, we've chosen to provide the Fan Fiction authors of PSO-World with the ability to properly indent their paragraphs. This new feature is our new [tab] tag, which I will now explain.
When Ryna and I sat down to discuss the sorts of things I believed the new forum software should have, one of the demands I put forth was a proper ability to indent a paragraph. I suggested that an inline replacement of the tab character with a simple HTML "&tab" might be good, but it turned out that the creation of "[tab]" and "[/tab]" took Ryna less time to create than it did for him to tell me that he had created it. It also turns out that the mechanics it operates on have a few useful quirks that can be exploited to perfectly create ideal results.
I was concerned that formatting a chapter to post would be a problem, as it's really a great deal of tags into insert, and can conceivably be quite a hassle. Some quick research determined, however, that it's actually quite easy to add the tags by using Notepad or Wordpad's Search & Replace command. I'll explain the process, here.
The simple of it, is to place [tab] and [/tab] at both ends of the paragraph that you want to indent. The opening tag must be on the same line as the beginning of your paragraph, or the results will not be apparent. The placement of the closing tag, however, does make a difference.
If you place the closing tag (/tab) of the previous paragraph immediately before the opening tag (tab) of the next paragraph, you wind up with two paragraphs with no huge gap between them, as you've seen with most of the paragraphs in this post that you are presently reading. Alternatively, you can place the closing tag on its own line, or immediately at the end of your previous paragraph to produce two paragraphs with a gap between them; commonly seen in regularly published material to denote a minor break between segments within chapters. You've already seen this effect in this post, as well.
If you've taken your fan fiction authoring seriously enough for this sort of formatting to matter to you, then you're probably doing all of your typing in an external word processor or text editor of some sort, as opposed to using the forum's reply boxes. The Search & Replace technique should work for any text editor you may happen to be using. I am, of course, operating on the assumption that you've been using a Tab character to manually format your paragraphs, rather than using a word processor-specific indenting feature to format them automatically. I'm also assuming that you possess a firm grasp of fairly basic computer-using operations, such as Copy and Paste.
- Highlight one of the tab characters at the beginning of a paragraph, and copy it to your clipboard.
- Select "Find and Replace" (or whatever equivalent you may have) from your text editor's "Edit" menu (or whatever equivalent location), and paste the Tab character into the Find field, then place [/tab][tab] in the Replace With field. Hit "Replace All".
- Find your segment breaks, and manually separate delete the [/tab] from the beginning of the new segment, and replace it at the end of the previous segment. You can remove the extra line from between the paragraphs, if you like. When posted, there will be a properly-sized gap between the paragraphs.
- Go to the first paragraph of your chapter, and remove the [/tab] from it. It's unnecessary.
- Complete any other BBcode formatting that you may need (maybe you have boldings or italics to preserve?), copy the chunk you just prepared, paste it into your reply box, and BLAM! You now have a properly formatted fic!
Now remember, these aren't rules; they're only guidelines. If you have a specific method of formatting your fics that you'd like to continue with, then by all means, go right ahead with that. For those of you who'd like to use a more traditional approach however, this is the easiest means to go about it that I've found, thus far.
Fan Art: Embedding deviantART
I don't know how exciting this really is, but we now have the [devart] tag. This isn't going to allow you to stuff deviantART pictures into your thread in the way that [img] does, but it does at the very least, get the picture in the thread. It's a thumbnail, at worst. Here's an example of its usage:
Result:Code:[devart=nokame]68632554[/devart]
68632554 by ~nokame on deviantART
The argument contained in the opening tag ([devart=nokame]) is "nokame", in this case, because I've chosen to borrow a picture from Sayara's DA account, for the sake of this example. To post your work, obviously you'll want to replace "nokame" with your DA account name. To single out the specific work, you'll just need to replace the "68632554" in the example with the ID the work you'd like to post. In this case, I snagged it from the end of this URL:
http://nokame.deviantart.com/art/Tingle-68632554
As with the [tab] tag, there's no rule requiring you to use it, but if you are to post work from deviantART, I do recommend you use this, as a thread with a picture grabs attention rather more quickly than a thread with a link.
Fan Art: User Picture Galleries
Now this is interesting. Most of us have places, such as Photobucket to upload our images to. For those who can't be assed to find a new site, let alone register on one, you'll find that PSO-World now offers the ability to upload pictures to personal galleries. Of course, at the time that I am writing this, you're limited to a total of 60 images per album, so it's not unlimited, but you'll be able to produce a collection of your works that'll be associated with your profile.
Code:[IMG]http://www.pso-world.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=14&pictureid=19[/IMG]
To Use:
- Go to your User CP and click on the Pictures & Albums link on the menu on the left. If you don't have an album that you're satisfied with uploading your artwork into, then click on "Add Album" and create one.
- Click on the "Add Pictures" link within your fan art album, and upload the picture you'd like to share.
- Click on the thumbnail for your new picture. You'll find that the BBcode to post the image has been provided for you. Copy and paste that into your post. You have now used your Picture Gallery to share your Fan Art on PSO-World.
Fan Video: YouTube Support
The ability to embed videos is something that I've wanted on this site, for a long, long time. I'm hoping that the addition of this feature will encourage the community to produce more music videos, more machinema, and more various other video-based, fan works. Now that we have it, it's up to you guys to use it.
This is actually really easy to work with. It works just like the [img] tag--
Example:Code:[url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXBmKj2gZeI[/url] or [url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXBmKj2gZeI[/url]
Special thanks goes to JonathanF, for providing a video to use in this example.
This should also work with a number of other video services, as well. The forum will identify what the link is referring to, and plug everything in accordingly. I'll update this later with a more comprehensive list. By way of clarification, a bug switches the tag to "url" when you hit Edit or Preview, whereas you'll probably want to use "ame", instead. It's supposed to work with "url", but it seems like it doesn't always do the job.
Miscellaneous: File Attachments
The last feature I'd like to talk about here, is File Attachments. There are various file types that can be attached to posts now, several of which, are potentially useful around here. Photoshop PSD files (up to 195.3 KB) can be attached to a post, for example, so that you can share Photoshop resources, or Fan Fiction authors can choose to attach a Word DOC file (again, up to 97.7 KB) of the chapter they just posted, if they wish to be generous to people who'd prefer to print the work and read it on paper. Other file formats include BMP (97.7 KB), GIF (195.3 KB), JPE (97.7 KB), JPEG (97.7 KB), JPG (97.7KB), PDF (97.7 KB), PNG (195.3 KB), TXT (97.7 KB), and ZIP (195.3 KB).
Example:Code:[attach]4[/attach]
Attachment 4
To Use:
- When creating a thread or posting a reply, scroll down to the "Additional Options" box beneath the post editor, and click on the "Manage Attachments" button.
- In the window that pops up, click the "Browse" button near the top, in the box labeled, "Upload File from your Computer".
- Select the file that you want to share, then hit the "Upload" button.
- It'll show up at the bottom of your post now, but if you want to stick it into a specific place, then continue with the following steps.
- After it's been uploaded, there will be a link to it in the box labeled, "Current Attachments". Find the URL that the link goes to, and take a good look at it. I suggest copying it to your clipboard, and pasting it into Notepad.
- Grab the number that follows "attachmentid=", and stick it in between [attach] and [/attach], as in the example given.
There are a great deal of potential uses for this feature, most of which, I am certain to be entirely unaware of, at the moment. The size limitations are subject to change, and may be made slightly larger, as we continue to adjust and tweak the new forums.
That's it for now, folks! We'll continue to work on improving these features, and adding new features as the ideas and inspirations come up. In the mean time, get back to creating, critiquing, and enjoying!
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Originally Posted by Sord
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