Don't Use Spelled Out Chapter Numbers In Title Boxes

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I have to keep saying this, but if you do it means extra work for someone, a lot of the time, me.

Hugs,
Erin

Chapter Numbers

Puddintane's picture

Because of the manner in which files are stored and sorted, it saves lots of time if the titles in the Title box is kept in strict alphabetical order, and arabic numbers are the only thing that sorts reliably.

This also means that you have to copy your former story titles exactly. You can't use:

MyStory - Part 1, then
MYStory Pt. 2, and then
Mystory - 3 - and expect them to sort properly without someone having to tidy up eventually.

In fact, the above list would sort like this:

Mystory - 3
MyStory - Part 1
MYStory Pt. 2

You can make the chapter numbers anything you like in the Story box, Roman Numerals, I Ching hexagrams, Signs of the Zodiac, Major Arcana of the Tarot (keeping copyright in mind), or Alphabetised Animal Symbols — A is for Aardvark, B is for Bonobo, C is for Chicken.

MyStory

Chapter One

or, The Plot Sickens

by Dudley Doright

-----------

MyStory

Chapter IV

by Marcus Aurelius

-----------

MyStory

by Frutiger Salad

Chapter Apple

A handy technigue to make this easy is to make your first title, copy it to a file of its own, and then duplicate it however many times you like.

When you need the next title, you don't have to remember, just cut and paste the one at the top into your story, which also updates your list.

MyStory - Chapter 1
MyStory - Chapter 2
MyStory - Chapter 3
MyStory - Chapter 4
MyStory - Chapter 5
MyStory - Chapter 6
MyStory - Chapter 7
MyStory - Chapter 8
MyStory - Chapter 9
MyStory - Chapter 10
MyStory - Chapter 11
.
.
.
etc.

Don't worry about ordering the numbers themselves, or trying to space out the numbers with blank space or ugly leading zero(s), as there are ways to handle this algorithmicaly.

Also don't worry about the exact format of your titles, as long as they're exactly consistent up to your chapter number, they'll work.

MyStory 1 - A New Day
MyStory 2 - Tomorrow
MyStory 3 - Another Day

MyStory [1] Return of the Octopus
MyStory [2] Return of the Octopus
MyStory [3] Return of the Octopus

Cheers,

Puddin'

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

How about?

How about using Kanji to numberour stories?

Love,

Paula

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

The Coda
Chapterhouse: Dune

Paula

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

The Coda
Chapterhouse: Dune

I have to observe that many people won't have Kanji available

Puddintane's picture

But as an inline graphic, you could easily include them in a title that everyone with normal vision could see.

Chapter 3 - 三 -  Japanese Number 3 in Kanji]

The first Kanji character is a Unicode character rendered (if it is rendered at all) by your computer. The second is an image containing both an alt description and a title tooltip to make them accessible in several ways. The image would be prettier if it were transparent, but this was just for illustration.

I'd like to invite anyone who reads this note to tell me if they can see two Kanji characters or just the last one.

Cheers,

Puddin'

P.S. For Manga- or Anime-themed stories, I think this would be a nice effect, but not in the Title box.

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

I see two :) I'm currently

Piper's picture

I see two :)

I'm currently using ubuntu as my os and FireFox browser.

-P/KAF


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


ubuntu and other Linux / Unix OS's

Puddintane's picture

Most usually have Unicode enabled by default, and at least one large Unicode font is pre-installed with Chinese/Japanese characters available. I run Mac OS-X, vaguely Unix-based, so I see both as well. Windows systems, especially older Windows systems, are more likely to experience problems.

Cheers,

Puddin'

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

UNIX 03 Certification

Piper's picture

Macintosh OS X is more than vaguely unix based. It's a UNIX 03 Certified UNIX OS :)

It's not Unix Like, or Linux Based. For all proper definitions, it is UNIX :) (or, at least 10.5 Leopard running on Intel hardware is).

They've just managed to put such a pretty, and usable shell on top, that people don't need to know they are using UNIX :)

On a side note... I've rebooted into Windows XP, and can see both the Unicode Character and the GFX :)

-HuGgLeS-
-P/KAF


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


OK... It's Unix...

And you can escape from the Leopard shell into Unix. but many in its target market don't actually know that, nor know what to do once they got there. Not that this is a bad thing, as one can do amazingly bad things very quickly once you've escaped to a more primitive shell like BASH.

Cheers,

Liobhan

-

Cheers,

Liobhan

Teminalization

Back in 10.4 it used to be iTerm, but in 10.5 it's all about my custom Terminal session set to work with my zsh prompt. Mmm, delicious completion beats the hell outta tcsh.

As a side note, does anyone who has a choice in Windows ever not install the East Asian and complex languages? Maybe it's just me, I like being able to read the Hebrew and Japanese, even if Gentoo, Mac OS, and Win XP can't agree on Unicode code sets.

Kanji

Hi

Running Vista with IE8 and see both Kanji characters

Karen

I see both...

...running WinXP and Firefox on an old Dell Laptop semi-affectionately referred to as "Idiot-Lappy".

On the other hand, I've got both Japanese and Chinese language modules installed, as well as a few others. ^^; Maybe I'm not the best person to ask?

-Liz

-Liz

Successor to the LToC
Formerly known as "momonoimoto"

Probably not...

Puddintane's picture

I'm fond of looking at pages the way they're meant to be seen, so have something available for almost every language in the world. I hate seeing all the little crazy default symbols when I could be looking at what it is. The only problem is that it makes it hard to see what a normal installation looks like.

Cheers,

Puddin'

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Normal Installation

That's the entire point about the web, that so many authors/publishers/web monkeys seem to miss - there is no normal installation on the web. Even within the same country, it is not possible to assume that every user has the same facilities available.

<rant>
I do wish these people who try to constrain their websites to a pixel-perfect representation of a printed page would get a clue. I don't run your operating system or browser, and my display has a different resolution to the one you're trying to force on me, and if you persist in this stupidity I shall just go elsewhere. Ditto redoubled for brain-dead sites who insist that the only way I can get in is to run Flash. Well no thanks, I'd prefer not to waste my bandwidth downloading some irritating blinky thing when all I want to do is press a button on a menu to get to another page.
</rant>

The world wide web was never designed like that, it was supposed to just adapt to whatever the reader's browser thought was acceptable. Then the market-droids got to work. Same way no-one understands how DNS works; they think that a web-site has to have .com on the end.

On a lighter note, despite your attempts at internationalisation, I note that your tool-tip is in English :)

Penny

Can I use this?

Seriously, as a pro web developer, we get really irritated by half-assed amateurs who can't be bothered.

Admittedly, one has to make some assumptions, and IE makes life harder, but the designer's job is to make it so the end users can, well, use it.

I can see both. But I added

Brooke Erickson's picture

I can see both. But I added Kanji (and a lot of other things) due to folks over on LiveJournal who talked about things like their Japanese lessons. :-)

Brooke brooke at shadowgard dot com
http://brooke.shadowgard.com/
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
"Lola", the Kinks

The permalink?

AIR, WP works with PHP regex so you can reformat the slug. I imagine Drupal should have similar functionality.

If I understand what you're saying...

Puddintane's picture

...this would constrain authors, either before or after the fact, to certain predefined title formats, which would be contrary to site "standards," which have a certain amount of anarchy built in.

To handle chaos reliably requires a human brain, since machines are notoriously bad "guessers," and even poorer mind readers.

For example, I just reformatted a number of title names in the same series, all of which were formatted slightly differently to each other, but with a combination of transcription errors that caused them to sort "correctly," as long as there were only a few, and as long as every subsequent error happened to cause a similar upward shift in alphabetical sort.

Which one of these differing formats was the "correct" version, upon which all changes should be based? What would a machine do? Make an aesthetic judgment? Toss a coin?

Close inspection will reveal similar "transcription errors" in many series, some of which have been handled through reformatting titles, and some through changing the weighting, all of which require extra steps by someone human, either the author, a site helper, or Erin.

Guess which option(s) Erin would prefer?

No fair "cheating" by reading her note.

Cheers,

Puddin'

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Kind of, but not really

The great thing about regular expressions if you can do it (hmm, mebbe I could whip it up as a plugin?) is that you could say, for example, every time it sees "umptischrunch chapter three" it makes the permalink umpti-3.

Since this a purely code basis, and not a representational issue, I can't imagine any author having an issue. It can be set up to ignore a great deal of human inconsistencies as well (I'm always having to reprogram around people not watching their cases).

What note is this?

What note

Puddintane's picture

The one where she says "Don't Use Spelled-Out Chapter Numbers."

As I see it, even with careful coding, you'd still affect the appearance of the links, since the final name appears in the goto links at the bottom of the page, in the right-hand index to related stories, and in the splash box title above the splash box proper. Writers can be particular about this. Some prefer, for example:

Blahblah ~ 2 ~ and others
Blahblah - 2 - which may seem an inconsequential thing to non-poets.

So the Title box title is also a presentation element.

There is a conversion that already takes place, turning the splash box title into an actual file name as seen in the address bar in your browser.

Cheers,

Puddin'

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style