Check out Story Master for porting stories off fanfic
There is a site/app which will port stories and reviews off fanfic, it's called Story Master, @_storymaster on Twitter, I cant link as Im on my phone but a Google search should bring it up. A lot of my friends on twitter have used it with good results.
- Again, it took several hours to get mailed. No big surprise, I guess.
- Single HTML file, compressed in a ZIP one.
- Table of Contents actually works, hooray. The mail address is again coded in the file, but since it's HTML, it's easy to edit out if you want to.
- CSS classes are used for the fic... but they're never defined, I think? Odd, but the result still looks quite okay for me at least, so no urgent complaints there.
Final note on both this and the PDF export (which, looking at it, seems to be just a PDF-ified version of the HTML export): Something strange happened in the exporting process. After chapter 7, the paragraphs are suddenly separated by an extra linebreak even though the original fic doesn't have them. I briefly checked the HTML sources of chapters 7 and 8 (on FF.net) and couldn't find a difference. Genuinely not sure what triggered this - maybe it's just an issue with this fic?
All in all, HTML fanfic export is very good and puts multi-chapter fics into a highly convenient all-in-one format, perfect for archiving or offline reading. Not sure what that one linebreak bug(?) is all about, but that's not a dealbreaker in my eyes and was maybe just a hiccup with something in my fic not playing nice.
(Edit to add: Just noticed the news post on the main site - apparently, FF.net's recent spazzing prompted a rush by panicked users on the site, so that might explain the long delays.)
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Someone was kind enough to tell me that StoryMaster was being discussed and I thought I'd come and browse what people were saying.
To your comments on PDF: Yeah, I know it's butt-ugly! PDFs are a pain to produce. Since this entire service is free and I use my personal computers to process the requests, I'm going with as many free utilities as I can, which includes the utility I use to convert the files from HTML to pdf/epub/mobi, etc. I don't have that much control over the conversion process. I spent days tweaking the settings on the PDF conversion when I was coding it, but no matter what, it still all came out pretty damn ugly. I'm not at all happy with it, but I have very limited control over it. So in the end, I went for readability over anything else. It's ugly, but it works.
If you go for epub or mobi format, it looks much, much better. I personally have both a Kindle and an iPad, and both formats come out looking good on my eReaders.
Because of the quirks in the conversion process, some parts of the document work in some formats ( like the ToC ) but not in other formats. Again, not something I have a ton of control over.
A request for a single item, like a story or reviews will be sent as is, except HTML. When I email HTML files, they often get blocked by firewalls or virus software, which is why it's always sent ZIPed.
And yes, right now there's a backlog of requests because since FFn decided to do this, the volume to my site has gone up by a factor of 5. So sometimes there's a wait for requests.
Thank you for your comments and thanks for using the service. I love knowing that something that started as a way to help me and my friends read stories on our eReaders is helping so many people. :)
StoryMaster Admin
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