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Deviousness `ChewedKandi has certainly gone out of her way to keep the vector community on the right path. Always making sure that her talents are infinitely scalable, Sharon has put her bezier curves to excellent use, and firmly anchored herself as an inspirational leader. We're absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for June 2013 to `ChewedKandi. Congratulations, Sharon! Read More
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Sta.sh
This may not be a big deal for some, but it can be something that can be looked into deeper from the writer's perspective. As we all know, there are many literature deviations here from many talented artists of the written word. However, all of their deviations have the same font style, same font size and same background colour (by default).
After the literature deviation is submitted and is displyed in the gallery, any person can do four things to it; change the font to one bigger size (and there only one bigger size), change text font from the default (just only one different font), identation and choose background from white/black. These options are readily availiabe on the top-right hand corner. These four options are there to automatically improve readibility for the reader,and that's fine, as this is for the benefit for the audience, including the writer, if he/she enjoys reading what he/she has written (or just being self-obsessive). This all happens after the deviation is submitted, but what about before, where the writer was supposedly having the most control?
Picture this: A writer has come up with a very good story and this typing it all up on a word processor (like Word), and finally finishes it. The writer then spruces up his work with a beautiful font and varying font sizes and colours to insert an impact (or even potray emotion) while arranging the paragraphs (or stanzas) stylishly to create a nice flow (which can be seen in many poetry works).
With all that done, the writer/poet submit his/her next masterpiece into dA by clicking on "add text" to, of course, add text. Almost certainly the writer has to forego all the beatification that was done on the word processor, and see his/her text conform to the default dA literature font and size (which looks really, really dull)for the sake of readibility. Though it is the words themselves that count, but the extra effort for the stylish editing can really make the work stand out, and it is the writer's freedom to do this. Sadly, the way dA submits literature by downsizing it down to the simple and boring font only limits the statement the writer wants to express. Writers are artists too!
So we have HTML for that,but with all of the and and
and </u> and what not, how can most writers even bother using these in their literature submissions? Most of the writers don't know what all of these HTML mean (though some coding are self-explanatory, like italics and bold, but that's not the point) and you can't expect them to know everthing beforehand. All that extra tedious coding that is so tedious and the fact the you can't press Tab to indent paragraphs (excluding the same automatic option mentioned above), makes submitting literature a pain.
Also, in the case when the writer makes some spelling/punctuatuion mistake (unless it is intended) and it ends up in the final submission, it can be a very embarrassing moment for the the writer. Yes, there's an "Edit text" option after you click on the "Edit Deviation" link, but what if you need to do multiple edits? Just clicking the link and editing the text form the edit text dialog multiple times is just too painful. Sure, it is the writer's fault that he/she made those errors but why make it so hard for them to fix it up? Punctuation is an art in itself.
The bottom of the problem is that there is not much freedom in submitting literature stright into dA. With that out of the way I'd like to make some suggestions to fix the problem.
The suggestions:
*Have a list of options for font selection/size/style/colour for literature deviations, without resorting to any HTML.
*Preserve font style/colour and stylish edits when tranferred from a word processor (if possible).
*Include the Tab button function in the "add text" dialog to ident paragraphs (rather than just stabbing the spacebar).
*Make editing the literature deviation (after submission) by making the "Edit Text" dialog availiable on the deviation view screen itself, raher than via the "Edit Deviation" link.
*Make editing the literature deviation (before submission, in the case of accidently making errors, for the whole world to see), by allowing the writer to edit text in the "Submit Deviation" screen.
I hope my suggestions makes thae lives of dA writer's more easier and have more freedom to express themselves however they want, rather than what deviantART wants.