Formatting of the story file is ultimately the author's responsibility. Although Gossamer volunteers may clean up the formatting of submitted files, that work is at the volunteer's discretion. Badly formatted files may either be rejected or archived as-is.
If you dislike the formatting of your story once it has been archived, it is your responsibility to send a correctly formatted revision to Gossamer at revisions@x-philes.com.
Why 70 characters?
When accessing a text file, most web browsers display that file using
a fixed-width font, in a preformatted condition. This means that how a
file is formatted is how a reader will see it. That is good for some
reasons (it means that a text file will generally display the same way
across different browsers and systems) but bad in others.
Unlike good HTML, a text file will not automatically be rewrapped for the browser window. Lines will not be resized to best suit each individual user's desktop and browser settings. So lines need to be at a length that the majority of users, with the majority of browsers and terminals settings, can access without needing the window to scroll horizantally. That length is generally accepted to be about 70 characters per line.
Also, some mail programs and providers (such as AOL) encode all outgoing mail and attached text files in an extended format called MIME. When a line is longer than about 70-80 characters, some versions of MIME will wrap overly long lines and may chop words in half rather than wrapping at the next blank space. A text file that has been "wrapped" by MIME is difficult to restore to its original format, and will be rejected by the Gossamer volunteers. To avoid these problems, a file sent via a program or provider which uses MIME encoding must have 70 or fewer characters per line.
How do I achieve it?
The simplest way to format your story to 70 characters per line is to
learn how to let your word processor do it for you. Once you have
finished writing and revising your story, and are prepared to submit it,
a simple reformatting of the font and page layout will force most
word processors to conform to this standard.
General guidelines:
Some more advanced text editors may have other options, such as a way to wrap all text to a certain number of columns. Limiting a fixed-width font to a certain number of columns is the same thing as limiting the number of characters per line; since each character takes the same amount of space, characters are arranged in "columns" down the screen.
If you use a very limited text editor, such as Notepad or Wordpad under Windows, there is no option to wrap lines at a specific length or save with line breaks intact, which makes the above instructions useless. The only way to create a file that conforms to these requirements is to treat the program as an old-fashioned typewriter. Determine how long 70 characters is by placing this 70 character line at the top of your file:
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
And simply hit Return/Enter whenever you're about to type past the end of this line.
For further information, please see the word processor specific documentation.
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What is ASCII text?
When you look at a story you've written in Microsoft Word, you see
text--letters, numbers, spaces and punctuation that you can read and
understand. Yet force a Word doc file open in another program, and you
will probably see strange symbols and codes. If you're good at
spotting things, you might be able to find your words buried under that
mess. Why does this happen?
Those symbols and codes are Microsoft Word's own language--and you're lucky if you can find another word processor, much less a program that doesn't do word processing, that understands it properly. It's not a universal standard, which is why you can't put it up on the web for everyone to download. Some people just aren't going to be able to read it. And that limits the audience of your story.
So what can you do to get around this problem? You have to use a document format that is universal--a format that all computers can easily understand at the most basic levels. ASCII text is the most basic level of text, hard-coded into the binary basics of computer systems. There are very few systems out there that cannot read ASCII text, and none of them should be personal computers.
How do I use it?
Almost every word processor has a way to save in ASCII rather than its
default document format. The best place to look for this choice is the
program's "Save as ..." selection on the File menu. Near the bottom of
the screen, you need to change the "Save as type" field to an ASCII format.
Some word processors, like Microsoft Word, offer several different choices.
In that case, you also want to choose a format that contains line breaks. So,
if you're a Microsoft Word user, you either want to choose ASCII text
with line breaks or MS-DOS text with line breaks.
Even if you choose to copy/paste your story directly into an e-mail message, you must save it as ASCII first, then reopen the file.
For further information, please see the word processor specific documentation.
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What is smart formatting?
Some word processors give you access to punctuation marks that are not
part of the ASCII basics and don't convert these punctuation marks to
their text counterparts when you tell the program to save as text. The
word processor that suffers the most from this problem is Microsoft
Word. But all word processors can have problems with smart
formatting if you copy and paste your story into an e-mail without
saving it as text and closing then reopening the text document
first.
Please consult the help documentation for your word processor to turn smart formatting/smart quotes off. Microsoft Word 97/2000 users can consult our Visual Guide.
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All of the stories on the archive are stored in plain text format. This allows them to be read by the widest possible audience. If the author uses HTML formatting tags to affect the presentation of their story, those tags may not be rendered consistently from browser to browser. In fact, some tags have been known to cause the content to be unreadable in or even crash certain web browsers. Of equal importance is that we maintain a consistent look and feel to our archive. If one author's stories are in black text on a white background and another's are blinking green text on a pink background, it detracts from the aesthetic value of the archive. We understand your desire to have your fiction look presentable, which is why we have established standards which make your fiction look good even in other web browsers and on other platforms that you might not even know exist.
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All stories listed by Gossamer are stored on Gossamer; this is the basis for the stability of the site. Gossamer is an archive, not a links page.
Accepting links makes a site much more fragile and transitory a resource. Web hosts go under, delete sites, and remove files; authors change web hosts, rename files, or disappear into thin air. Remote loading and deep linking are not considered good manners by many on the technical side of the Internet, and are disallowed by many web hosts.