Hi,

I know that this is a free site and all and up to now I've held my tongue because of that, but I can do so no longer. The formatting of stories just sucks.

For my latest story I've supplied all chapters in precisely the same format - RTF, but when the story is viewed as a whole the chapters are formatted differently.

The first chapter looked fined, the second to seventh chapter were formatted as centred italics and now the eighth chapter is centred italic and underlined. None of this formatting was what I intended.

It seems that each chapter is converted independently with a style name assigned for each different font format in the file in the order that that font format appears. However, the converter uses the SAME names each time it is run.

So the problem occurs when the chapters are formatted together in the 'view whole story' page.

So in chapter one, the first line of my story is a the title which is a bold header: this gets allocated rvts6. The second is the author, centred and in italics: this gets allocated rvts7. Next is the chapter header: rvts9. Then comes the main body of the story: rvts8

In the second chapter, the first line is again a heading - the chapter number. It gets allocated rvts6, so doesn't look too bad in the same font as the story title. Next is the body of the story which gets allocated rvts7 - hence the text is all centred and italic.

Either the style names need to be unique for each chapter, based on the actual style (eg arial8ptitalic) or a different approach for converting is needed.

I'm happy to provide my content in valid formatted HTML, but when I used to do that it also screwed up and I was recommended to use RTF instead.

I'm just really frustrated by all this and I've been getting complaints from readers who tell me that they love the story, but question 'my choice' of formatting.

Just what approach should I use to get consistent formatting across chapters? I don't care about fancy fonts or styles, I just want to have headings, plain text, italic and bold.



I won't mention the backslash and apostrophe problem in story names and summaries (but I cringe every time I see it and wonder how it takes to fix such a problem - two and half years so far and counting).

Rilawild