In anticipation of future overhauls to front-end word processing, I wanted to raise special consideration to literature submissions. The December update to address esoteric filenames added the ability to live-edit text submissions (as replacement uploads were disabled pending an overhaul of the back-end), which is very useful, although it does suffer similar problems to comments at large where the preview does not translate into the post. (This editor also parses primarily through HTML tags, which depending on its dependencies, may not square with BK's bid to consolidate site syntax around Markdown.)

My main focus, however, is allowing for greater formatting options. DeviantArt's spaghetti code involved a lot of trial and error, but if you knew HTML you could manage a fair play of tricks; these were bulldozed by Eclipse and made it literally impossible to preserve even semi-complex formatting unless files were submitted as dedicated PDFs. I'm wondering how more comprehensive Side 7's editor can be made specifically for literature: different fonts, preserving white spaces, handling sectional links for internal tables of contents, etc. Given the site can parse .RTF and .ODT files straight-up, the quantum leap would be presenting them verbatim, in their original layouts.

The other question is whether PDF support is possible: as I surface from the latest bout of archival mirrors, the countdown's started on certain pieces that I literally cannot replicate accurately not just here, but in most online word processors.

Last and probably least, we could expand literature categories beyond the current "Non-Fiction" catch-all, though that I may spin off into a general-purpose thread.

I very much want to overhaul the way that documents are parsed. I used a system called Pandoc to do conversions from Word, ODF, TXT, PDF (yes, PDF) and a large number of other formats, and convert them to Markdown to preserve formatting. Unfortunately, I've run into the issue that documents aren't reliably converting to Markdown. So, part of the compromise is to have them converted to HTML, instead, which has been consistent. This is a problem on my long to-do list to try to get it consistently converting to the Markdown format.

As far as fonts, colors, etc. go, that's going to require a complete overhaul of the text management system. Markdown doesn't account for that, so unless I maintain things in HTML, and allow editing to add in these features... sigh Maybe I should just stop worrying about abuses of that kind of markup, although I've already seen one example that changed the font on the whole page, which somewhat disrupted layout. Lots to consider.

As far as literature categories go, I'm open to specific suggestions. I did a bunch of research when developing the literature categories for what kinds of categories libraries, book stores, etc. use, so I went with that since that's what most people would probably be familiar with. So, what suggestions do you have?
-- BK

This is helpful, thank you.

Adding new categories isn't difficult. However, we're not set up for subcategories, so I'll have to consider how to list new categories that seem to be closer to sub-categories.
-- BK

It could be done similar to images where we have 'Fan Art - ...' and 'Photography - ...' prefixes. I noticed some categories are formats (Poetry/Prose), and some are super-genres (Fiction/Non-fiction/Fan-fiction), and while it's not a huge issue at the moment, that sort of jumble could cause confusion down the line.

Depending on how many are added, the menu will get long, but it's probably the best compromise unless/until a more complex category tree is available. DeviantArt used to have nesting categories, but these got axed with Eclipse, of course.

(Side note, but if-and-when categories are revamped, it might be an opportunity to make them browsable like tags.)

(Also, the user profile stats might need tweaking to account for the more diverse artists :B )

Yeah, the prefixes was the main way I was imagining doing the Literary categories.

Oh, making the categories browsable is a great idea!

RE: User Profile stats & Diverse Artists

Oh my. That is problematic, isn't it?
-- BK