Anyone who knows me at all knows that I love a good, long fanfic (with lots of smex, but that's another post...). The holiday exchange season is creeping up on us, as it is the time of year when people start to evaluate their lives and think that it would be a good idea to pull all their fanfic off the internet (it's not!!).
If you are like me, and you want ALL the fan fic, saving stories off the internet to your hard drive is essential to your sanity.
I ran into a poster on LJ who didn't realise that if you save simple text files of journal and some web pages, you will get a text format that includes characters to show italics and bold (usually slashes: /italicized or bold text here/), essentially giving you the story in a format that can be easily transferred to most reading devices without losing the author's intended passages of emphasis. If you didn't know you could do this either, read on!
lore's nerdy file-saving tipsIn your web browser, make the following choices:
File > Save Page As > Save As File Type
Choose .txt and then give the file a name. Hit Save.
If the person has NOT used Smart Quotes, you should get a story in all its texty glory, slashes for italics and all. Most saved journal pages are messy, with lots of gunk at the top and bottom in code, including comments. I used to clean up the files as I saved, and I recently stopped doing that. When I open the file again for reading, I'll clean it up then. Also, if I'm looking for sequels or more from the writer, there's plenty of hidden clues in the gunk at the top or bottom if I need it.
When I put a file on my Sony reader, I clean up the gunk. The lines break unevenly toward the end of paragraphs on the reader screen, but I don't find that the quirk makes the file unreadable. Also, I've never fiddled with a text file to try and fix that problem because it doesn't bother me, but you might be able to fix it. Maybe saving the text file with line wrap off? I'll have to try that sometime.
On Efiction web archives, you know there's a little printer icon at the top of the Table of Contents (also on the first chapter), and if you click it in the TOC, you get the entire story on one page, which you can then save as a text file. Again, no smart quotes means you'll get the /--/ for italics. Efiction is a VERY kind way to archive because people can choose to read by chapter or as a big chunk, and saving a multi-chaptered fic is one click of the printer icon (hint to those thinking of putting up their archive of their work!).
I'm sure other archive programs have functions like this, but not most of the online self-archives like FFN, Skyehawk, etc. Maddening. I've been known to scour the net for an hour hoping to find a fic in one file somewhere, rather than go through the hassle of putting together a 30-chapter, multi-part epic. On the wise advice of a friend, I've recently just started saving the chapters individually into a folder, but when you get past 10 chapters in a fic, even saving by chapter gets tedious.
I'm a fan of looooong fics, so I've obsessed about this quite a bit. And I like saving things off to my hard drive when I think the fic is special, because we never know when something or someone is going to up and disappear from the internet. Lately, I've been saving almost defensively, as the HP fandom winds down and drifts away. Archives and saving fics in a readable format are more important to me than ever.
Finally, there are some ways to possibly get around smartquotes, but I've only ever done it through experimentation, with no real consistency. You know you have a file with smartquotes, btw, when the quote marks and apostrophes all turn into question marks. Bleh!
love, lore