How to Use the Story Formatter

The goal of the story formatter tool is to allow formatting text documents with a few basic HTML formatting tags. Specifically, bold, italic, and centering are available.

Expectations

There are a limited number of use cases for this tool. These are:

1. Starting with plain text and marking up with bold, italic, and centered tags using the tool.
2. Starting from a very simple HTML document and tweaking styles with the tool.

When starting from HTML, documents saved as HTML by LibreOffice Writer are preferred.

Support for other word processors is not a design goal. Even with LibreOffice, your document structure should be limited to using the predefined styles for Title, Subtitle, Heading 1, Heading 2, and Body Text. Any text aligned with extra spaces, tabs, and carriage returns will not come out as expected.

No whining.

Inputting Your Masterpiece

There are two ways to get your document into the tool to be formatted.

1. For plain text, copy from your word processor and paste into the textbox at the top.
2. For HTML documents, drag the file from your computer and drop it on the textbox at the top.

The first method (copy and paste) works in nearly all cases, but you lose any formatting from the original document. You'll need to use the formatting options in the tool to redo bold, italic, centering, and so on.

The second method (drag and drop) works in some cases. Using this method, the tool will take cues from your original document and try to create an acceptable rendition using only bold, italic, and centering.

More on this in the Details of Automatic HTML Conversion section below.

When You're Done

If everything looks good in the preview, use either the Download button to save the resulting text or the Clipboard button to copy it.

Upload or paste to your favorite publishing platform and enjoy. Keep in mind HTML is free flowing by nature and the preview you see in the tool may not match the end results exaclty.

In Summary

• Use plain text or LibreOffice Save as HTML documents for the input.
• Limit yourself to Title, Subtitle, Heading 1, and Heading 2, and Body Text styles when structuring your LibreOffice document.
• Don't try to align text with spaces and carriage returns. It won't work.
• No whining.

Your Turn

You can test drive the tool and try both kinds of input by downloading the sample ebook below and running it through the formatting tool.

For those still clinging to the subscription fee-based safety blanket of other word processors, I offer these lovely downloadable files as substitutes:

• PDF export to see what the original formatting looks like.
• Plain text to experiment with clipboard copy paste input.
• Save as HTML to use for drag and drop. (For this one, right-click and save as.)

For text input:

1. Open the ePaperback.odt file in LibreOffice.
2. Select everything (or use CTRL+A)
3. Copy to the clipboard (CTRL+C)
4. Paste the clipboard into the story formatting tool.

For drag and drop:

1. Open the ePaperback.odt file in LibreOffice.
2. Use the menu to select File, Save a Copy...
3. Choose HTML Document (Writer) as the Save As Type dropdown selection.
4. Drag and drop the resulting HTML document onto the formatting tool's text input.

Evaluating the results

The goal is to take a nicely formatted document, something that would look good published as an ebook, and be able to use it on publishing platforms that only support a handful of formatting options.

Considering the complexity of the original ebook with its cover art, title page, and page break formatted chapter headings, the tool does a decent job of distilling it down to text with some basic HTML tags.

With the clipboard copy method, you're left with more work to do in terms of formatting, but you have more control over the end product. With drag and drop, you leave the formatting up to the tool and manually clean things up as needed.

Either way, you can save a lot of mundane work when compared to adding HTML tags by hand. And if you choose your original document's formatting wisely, you can get a nice-looking conversion with very little effort.

Details of Automatic HTML Conversion

When you use drag and drop to import an HTML file, the tool will look at your document as a collection of headings and paragraphs (e.g. <h1>, <h2>, and <p>) and attempt to simplify it to plain text formatted with only bold, italic, and centering.

Headings

Level-one headings (<h1>) are converted to bold text. Level-two headings (<h2>) are converted to italic text. Only H1 and H2 headings are considered.

In addition, headings are separated from the preceding text with a dinkus. Yes, that's a real word. It's the three asterisks centered on a line you might have encountered separating sections of text, particularly in older books.

It may seem archaic, but when formatting options are limited, the dinkus is an effective way to give a visual break to a block of text. Plus, it's fun to say. Dinkus.

Whenever a level-two heading immediately follows a level-one heading, with no paragraph text in-between, the dinkus is skipped.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs are stripped of most tags, with only the text itself being preserved. Exceptions are <b> for bold text, <i> for italic text, and <p align="center"> for centered text.

Page Breaks

There are no page breaks in HTML (just like there's no crying in baseball). HTML is a continuous flowing document. Any paragraphs in the original with a break-before="always" or page-break-before="always" style get a dinkus (there's that word again!) inserted to break up the flow of text.

Horizontal Lines

In LibreOffice, there's a feature called a horizontal line. You can insert one by accessing the menu item Insert > Horizontal Line. When the document is saved as HTML and then dragged and dropped on the tool, you'll end up with a dinkus.

Sample Formatting for a Typical Story

The following snippet shows what can be done with only bold, italic, and centered text. Explanations follow the example.

It's a short example, but it has nearly all the elements you might encounter when writing a work of fiction.

• A title – bold and centered on a line by itself
• A subtitle – italic and centered
• An author – regular text and centered

Then there's our old pal the dinkus (* * *) to help visually separate the title page from the rest.

Notice the order. Bold, italic, plain. Primary importance, secondary importance, regular importance.

It's the same for the headings. Heading 1, heading 2, regular text. The only difference is the title page uses centering to make it stand out that much more.

I didn't make this stuff up. The APA style guide has some things to say about headings. The Chicago Manual of Style stresses consistency, but is less specific when dispensing heading advice.

To summarize, these are the levels of the various headings, ranked by their importance in the document:

1. Title
2. Subtitle
3. Heading 1
4. Heading 2

The title and subtitle are centered to further stress their importance, but otherwise it's just bold first, italic second, just like the headings.

Level-one headings are best suited for chapters. Level-two headings can be used to denote a change in point of view, as shown above or to introduce a change in scene, as shown below. Scene change headings work well with third-person viewpoints when there's no need to introduce who's speaking.

All of the formatting shown above can be accomplished using drag and drop automatic conversion. There's no need to format by hand.

For example, using LibreOffice, apply these built-in paragraph styles to your document as appropriate:

• Title
• Subtitle
• Heading 1
• Heading 2
• Body Text

Do this and you can keep your story saved as a nicely formatted ebook. Any time you need to upload to a platform that has limited support for formatting, come back here and use the tool to distill it down to the basics.

And here's one last dinkus. Just so you can say it one more time... dinkus.

Secret Feature

Because you read all the way to the end of the help, you get a secret feature!

You ready for it? Hold the Shift key when you click the Download button (or just use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+R) and you can save an RTF version of your marked up story.

Why? If you're publishing ebooks, most places want submissions in DOCX or RTF with 12-point Arial font. So shift-click to get your RTF file in boring old 12-point Arial.

The rest of the formatting is pretty non-existent, with single-spaced lines and no indenting. But that can be changed to suit by opening in your favorite word processor (which is LibreOffice, right?) and editing the default paragraph style's indents and spacing.