by gsteemso » Thu May 27, 2010 12:53 pm
Their filters apply to private messages sent through their system, too. Gods help you if you try to tell someone that their chapters are unlikely to get much of an audience unless longer than 2000 words — it will come out as “200”. I hadn’t realized this would happen to any run of more than two identical characters.
I was forced to convert to the <HR> style of scene break a long time ago, which was very annoying as I already been using that to delimit the title & author’s notes and stuff at the beginning and end of each chapter. The damn thing won’t let you put two <HR>s in a row to make a higher-level scene break, either, though I managed to get around that (sort of) by inserting a paragraph with just a lone period in between two of them. It’s only a little bit hideous.
I should point out, also, that it is inherent in HTML that runs of spaces/newlines/tabs telescope down to a single space. This was done deliberately so that the formatting in the source code would not “bleed through” into the displayed version. The annoying thing is that FFnet filters out all varieties of non-breaking space characters, so you can’t get around it in a simple way. I had a workaround for a while where I alternated Unicode ZERO-WIDTH NON-JOINER characters and ordinary spaces, but the evil sods defeated that one a couple of years ago. I haven’t tried inserting other zero-width formatting characters instead (there are many), but I’m guessing if they nailed one they’ll have nailed them all.
The world’s only gsteemso