Styling your text!

How do you like to style your fiction posts? On a forum, you can use css or bbcode etc. to give your posts a fancy look or tone. In other media, you can often use bold, italics etc for emphasis, or put symbols in between paragraphs to denote time skips or such.

Roleplay posts often look elaborate with colors and pictures and code!

So what do you like to do?

I use fairly simple bbcode on my fic and RP posts here on the forums because it looks nice and is useful for organisation etc etc. In my other work, I just use formatting as needed to denote thoughts, emphasis or to denote time skips like you said. The artists I work with on my comics hand write the text which gives it a unique look, if that counts.

One of PokéCommunity's greatest assets is the CSS support, with only AO3 getting anywhere close, and it can help with stories a lot. That said I don't actually do that much formatting - I use a premade PokéCommunity CSS template to style most of my recent material, which sets up ready to use:

* A specific typeface for non-story sections (author's notes, etc) with as little additions as possible respect to the viewer's theme/style
* A specific Book-type typeface for story sections with indentation and letter spacing to make reading long sections easier
* Regular styling and spacing for headings , with each also given a HTML anchor or equivalent
* font-variant effects to denote various in-universe situations such as loud speakers (Dialga in Beyond Today), loudspeakers or PSA, condensed or shadowed text for telepathy, and change of indentation or alignment to indicate the distance or direction an offscreen voice comes from

Colour and size is not really something I make much use of, because it can get in the way of getting your work in a print-ready format, for epubs and the like, but some light usage should be no problem.

I also also use basic bbcode for organization purposes. Otherwise I don't do CSS or such due to me believing if you have compensating good CSS when your prose might be weak won't do it for me. So I think focusing your prose is more important than making your post fancy.

Bay said:

I also also use basic bbcode for organization purposes. Otherwise I don't do CSS or such due to me believing if you have compensating good CSS when your prose might be weak won't do it for me. So I think focusing your prose is more important than making your post fancy.

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Just be like me and do CSS and solid prose. ;)

Actually I don't think I've styled my text much at all in my writing... just some italics here and there for emphasis, maybe some bold, and colors only in some sign-ups haha!
When it comes to organize the post with a title and additional information, or simply when it comes to the backgrounds, though... that's where CSS really comes in. I use it way too often, even just the Span tag, and I really like to come up with cool, colorful designs (even if I'm not that great at picking said colors) 😍

I use more simpler methods, but also utilize images when needed/i can, which honestly, it may save time in explaining something that's hard to explain. Other than that, the most i use is the Forest CSS. My all-time favorite. But asides that, i keep it simple and basic.

Because i'm a techy potato.

Some very basic css that's just border and background color change.

One of the things that I like about using CSS rather than text forms in order to style a story, is that CSS messes less with screenreaders, which means it keeps your fic more accessible.

Of course, some CSS things do interact, so in general there are some attributes I never use, such as display, floating, hyphenation control, and word-spacing.