Writing, drawing, rumor board posting tips/guides

[Tekky]

Hello!

I have on occassion taken roles where I could write, or have had roles where
you'd have to write in game rumor posts, or describe illustrations or similar.
Even tdesc's and item descriptions all are seemingly formated the same way
in game. This also works for bio entries!

I wish to share some tips on how to make a text not look chopped off, or
where it starts to chop your sentences up very strangely. My suggestion is
to write up what you wish to write in notepad or something similar. I am
writing this entire post as if I was going to post it into an in game book
or similar.

The first order of business is to understand that the linebreak is this long:
[---|----| ----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----]
And that 16384 character maximum is what fits on a single scroll, for example.
The actuality of that line is that you can exceed it by a few characters, but
as you can see from this text, I am skirting very close to the max. And that
will be fine.

If you're simply typing in notepad, you can paste that graphics in and then
manually keep an eye on your sentence lengths and hit enter. When you are
done with your letter/journal/drawing/rumor then you can simply copy the
entire thing into your client. I use mushclient and it works fine, you might
have to tinker with your settings on other clients.

The biggest issue people run into when they simply type into the in game
editor is how to do a perfect clean paragraph break - as it will not actually
give you a space as I have here between there, UNLESS you go to a new line
and simply enter a 'space'. If you highlight this text, you will see that
between here

and here, there is a spacebar input, that will make the editor in game
properly put a space between the paragraphs.

This is all moot, however, if you decide to simply write one sentence at a
time and then use the in game formatting. I would suggest you use .i as it
contracts all sentences nicely and puts an indent. You can also use this for
tdescs.

Ascii art and such is often used sparingly to embelish certain works in game
- we're technically not allowed to use it for maps, or in place of actual
artwork. But I have seen it used on occassion, the notepad copy method works
fine then too. But be warned - no ascii using tilde(~) or '.q' will work,
because it will 'terminate' your editor and think you are done.

.c will simply clear all your text, allowing you to start again. While .d#
is excedingly useful sometimes, it does delete ENTIRE lines from the bottom.
Say you pasted a nice letter and accidently just input "look" and then you
will actually WRITE look into it. Doing a '.d1' will then delete the last line
inputted into the editor. It is ALWAYS a good idea to use ".s" to view your
work before you submit it. As there is no way to re-do a page once you have
commited it with a '.q'

Another thing to mention is that when you are in the editor, you cannot
receive any ways - but the person on the other end will be notified you are
in the editor. You can input commands, if someone suddenly walks up to you
and interaction is about to start - simply use '.x' in front of whatever
you need to do - ie '.x draw sword'.

I hope this was helpful to someone! If you have your own in game editor tips
and tricks, please post them below!

NOTE: Using notepad is good, because all the characters are of the same size, thus the ruler actually works - in this forum post the different characters have different sizes, so my run on length looks bad. Paste my text into notepad and you can see it conforms to the ruler length! (Which is 75 characters.. I think.)

[Jihelu]

I set word length to 77 and use this online program to make things look less poopy for art and other things.

https://www.browserling.com/tools/word-wrap

[Mr. Fancypants]

Oh boy! This is the day I've been training for!


Always, always format your text. Use .i or .f in the text editor, or use an external linewrap (such as the one Jihelu posted above).

This helpfile is invaluable: http://armageddon.org/help/view/Editor

Use a fixed-width font (Consolas, Courier, etc) if you are attempting to manually format your text using the in-game ruler.

Have a program like notepad++ open and use that to write with. Use caution with Word programs, because unless you've got the correct settings in place, they will use curly apostrophes. Curly apostrophes get eaten when you paste them into the game, which makes you look mildly illiterate.

If you copy-paste a block of text with an extra carriage return included ABOVE the block of test, that extra space will carry over.

When you format text, extra carriage returns between paragraphs will disappear.

Extra carriage returns BETWEEN or BELOW blocks of text pasted simultaneously will not carry over.

This means that if you want paragraphs to have an extra carriage return between them, you have to enter each paragraph separately.

[Refugee]

How many lines of text can be used in a drawing in a book?

[Lizzie]

When you draw in a book, you're not drawing an ascii drawing. You're typing a descriptive paragraph. Pretty sure it's the same limit. 80 characters is the max limit but that sometimes gets funky if you use the wrong font, so I always set mine to 75 or 76.

How many lines down the page - not entirely sure but I remember reading pages with one of my previous PCs that were pretty long, at least 60 lines.

[cnemus]

It seems that various mediums (scroll, parchment, book) have differing numbers of available lines. I have personally noticed a bug that starts to show up at 35+ lines although I have seen 80 used. I personally keep my use of the editor under 35 lines if possible.

[Feco]

I suggest using Notepad++.  You can set a line to appear on the right side of the document at however many characters you want, thereby letting you craft what you want before putting it in the editor.

[deskoft]

I second the Notepad++ hype-wagon. Copy paste the ruler or, when you become used to it, just see the char-count.

[John]

I've started using OneNote and setting the font type to code and pasting in the ruler so I know how wide a page is meant to be.

[Tuannon]

On the rare occasion I use a rumour board for anything, I tend to make the words short and the entire message
should lend itself to being further investigated unless it's in relation to something that someone of power wants
a binary answer to.

Example If noble X is offline and wanted to know if Y had been killed (and probably needed to know and is
unlikely to come back while Character Z is active) there would be a message along the lines of...

"Lieutenant Buhz reports that the pertaining to the western foyer has been concluded as Lady Ceylara
instructed."