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Question by Ligerstripe

How does Weasyle handle text?
Does it have a built in reader for anything other than .txt? It would be nice if it can open and display .odt or at the very least .doc file formats.

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Ligerstripe

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    Hendikins

    Note: I'm not a developer, and this isn't official comment after the first paragraph!

    For literary works you can upload plain text files and use Markdown formatting, or you can upload PDFs. Some other formats are supported by way of Google Drive Embedding.

    A major consideration with file format support is being able to read the submission from within the browser, without requiring a third party plugin or separate viewer. Forcing the reader to install additional software and/or use another application entirely to be able to read the submission makes for a poor user experience.

    This means looking at formats that:

    • Are directly supported by the browser
    • Can be supported by the browser without requiring additional client-side software (such as using pdf.js for in-browser PDF rendering)
    • Require minimal processing server-side, with a high degree of accuracy.

    There's no open parsers for DOC (and RTF, for that matter) files that we can be reasonably certain won't mangle formatting during the conversion process, which is also a poor experience for both writer and reader. At least DOCX and ODT are both ISO standards that are XML based, but still non-trivial to implement.

    I'd like to see us look in to support for the various eBook formats, and ePub looks promising as it could only require a fairly small amount of work to support. No promises though.

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      Ligerstripe

      Thank you. Currently, at least with so-furry and before the buy-out on F.A. I would have to save them as .txt. and for the former either C&P it into their backup uploader as the main one completely mangles 'anything', or go through and put a line-break at the end of every sentence as the latter is not set up to word wrap to screen size. And no one on F.A. wanted to scroll to the side..

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        Hendikins

        If you wish to upload as plain text, word wrapping should work properly on Weasyl. I've actually got a bunch of form letters for moderation that require it, and literary submissions should work identically to notes, comments, etc. in that respect.

        Also, if you're used to using FA's BBCode for formatting, Todex Todex has a nice handy cheat sheet for Markdown.