Wrangling a fic on FFnet?

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Wrangling a fic on FFnet?

Postby Ellen Kuhfeld » Sun Jun 26, 2011 4:50 pm

I posted Different Colors -- all 24 chapters -- as one story. Then I started putting up postludes individually. Have four of them so far. And that may not have been the wisest way to do it, because they're not connected as strongly that way.

Have any of you tried converting individual stories into chapters of something longer? How well did it work? How much of a fight did FFnet put up?

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Re: Wrangling a fic on FFnet?

Postby Shanami » Mon Jun 27, 2011 10:45 pm

Um, if you wanted to just get the text out with all of the formatting to repost them, I'm pretty sure that ff.net has a "backup download" feature somewhere in the documents manager area.

You could easily harvest the text that way into individual documents (or just select all/copy/paste) into individual documents to repost them.

That is assuming that you merely meant that you wanted to combine all of the raw chapters/text into something else (like the main story, or into a bulk-postludes store). I have no idea if it would be possible to actually convert what is already up into a grouped up thing without simply reposting.
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Re: Wrangling a fic on FFnet?

Postby PCHeintz72 » Mon Jun 27, 2011 11:54 pm

I would think the easiest way would be to simply make a new story entry, and have the 4 or however many postludes as chapters of that.

You will lose all reviews of them though.

You could tack the others onto the first, so you would at least have those reviews.

As for how to acquire the content, ideally you should have kept your copy. If not, know of three easy ways to grab content from FF.NET besides the back up option.

1. Open story up as a reader, and copy to clipboard. Then paste into Word /Writer or into the new story. Repeat per chapter. Issue here is you will lose formatting. This works great for me as I do most of my reading in a Text editor (Notepad++ or Helios Textpad work great and have spell checkers).

2. For 1 chapter stories, look at list of stories in profile, right click and select the save option if using Internet Explorer. This saved the FF.NET HTML version of the story. Sometimes formatting is slightly skewed, but should be mostly intact in the file. Load file into Microsoft Word or OpenOffice/Go OpenOffice/LibreOffice Write and can get at content that way.

3. For 1 or more chapter stories, there are story downloaders for FanFiction.NET, they place them supposedly with formatting intact into nice HTML files for offline use. Simply feed it your story link and it creates everything for you. You can then edit/take the content and repost into FanFiction.NET. I loath these not because they are not effective, but because it is practically universal that they do not give a Text output option. I hacked one old version of one of these once to force a Text option, but did not care for the results... had I fiddled more, I likely could have got it acceptable.
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Re: Wrangling a fic on FFnet?

Postby frice2000 » Tue Jun 28, 2011 12:54 am

Pretty sure this wasn't about downloading your own fics to reaquire them but I beleive the program PC is referring to is Fanfictiondownloader. Or perhaps PC was referencing Flag but Flag was never good in my opinion and still doesn't do TXT files either so that's likely what you were thinking of. Fanfictiondownloader on the other hand does have a TXT output option among many many others but most of the other converters are reliant on linking it to Calibre. Works very well and is far superior for downloading multiple chapters and converting to X and stripping extraneous FF.net junk then a Copy/Paste method. I haven't used the TXT output myself PC but I've found it's MOBI creation since it's gotten it's own website and new version numbers to be excellent and if it's a program you tried a few years ago its improved. Hell it can even download Mediaminer fics now and that is immensely helpful.
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Re: Wrangling a fic on FFnet?

Postby Ellen Kuhfeld » Tue Jun 28, 2011 7:35 am

I was wondering how to make the individual stories show up as individual chapters. Download is not an issue -- I have the stories on my own site, on my hard drive as both DOC and HTML, and on a backup drive. I've lost enough computer files in the past to be paranoid.

I do like PCHeintz72's suggestion of appending them internally to the original story.
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Re: Wrangling a fic on FFnet?

Postby Cheb » Tue Jun 28, 2011 12:10 pm

You can upload html files in the FF.net document manager. It removes any links and most of the tags but at least it keeps bold, italic and alignment -- all the formatting options FF.net supports.
I always upload my chapters as html.

FF.net importer supports a hell of a lot of formats.

I was wondering how to make the individual stories show up as individual chapters.

Upload a chapter in the document manager. Go to Story -> Edit. Select "add new chapter", selecting one of your uploaded documents in a drop-down list. Enter the chapter name.

I was wondering how to make the individual stories show up as individual chapters.

I suspect that's not possible without re-uploading them and adding them to an existing story.
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