Ellipses on the AO3? (Is this a known thing?)

[brightknightie]

A very kind person generously commented on a 2008 story of mine on the AO3 ("Milepost," FK, Tracy & Natalie), and when I re-read it to refresh my memory -- it was a fill in an LJ ficathon for a prompt by Wiliqueen -- I discovered that all the ellipses are gone. Wherever an ellipsis originally sat, there is now a blank space.

Has something happened to ellipses over the years? Some old formatting or code become incompatible? This story is from the days when I wrote in MS Word (presently, I write in Google Docs). Probably, the missing ellipses were the MS Word character for an ellipsis with which it would have automatically replaced the three periods I would have typed.

I usually re-read my stories in their entirety on posting to scrutinize for exactly this kind of thing. (You know the old truism: Typos are invisible until publication.) Of course, this particular story was uploaded later and backdated -- the AO3 didn't open until 2009 -- and perhaps I was loading several at a time and not paying as close attention as I should.

Could it be that all my vintage stories have blank spaces where their ellipses should be? Eeek. If so... to what extent do I need to go back and fix them, as a courtesy to anyone trying to read them from now on?

Comments

[switchbladeeyes]

Argh, that sounds frustrating! I've had issues with AO3 formatting (random spaces, weird line breaks) when using the rich text editor. The errors appear only when posted, not in the editor itself before posting. Took forever to manually fix the errors. Maddening.

This Google Doc script fixed the issues in seconds (vs. potentially hours manually), converting to HTML that could go in the AO3 HTML editor, which did not generate the errors: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19eZnBQ4989Dr17v2ODFgE8QWAo9Oahi4USDNS3hOSvM/mobilebasic

I mention that in case you do want to fix the old ones. I think Word Docs can be put in Google Docs, which could then run through the script.

I wonder if looking at a small sample of ones from the same time period might give you an idea if the error is common, without having to manually check everything.

Not that you have to fix the old ones if there is an issue. Or it could just be a slow project as you have time. Sorry that happened.

[brightknightie]

Yes, checking a few samples out of the whole corpus is the smart first step; thanks! I really shouldn't have jumped to conclusions from only one. I also shouldn't have posted while agitated.

And thank you for your generously detailed advice about the script and error patterns. I'll remember and pass them on to anyone who does their fic in the rich-text tab!

For myself, I've never used the rich-text tab. I didn't even notice it existed for years and years, until once a beta reader was confused at all the hand-coded HTML in my story draft, and I couldn't figure out why she was confused. "How else would one post?" I thought. ;-) I taught myself HTML in the '90s and CSS in the '00s; old habits...

I'm hypothesizing now that those Word ellipses characters that showed back in the day, and no longer show, may well still be there in the HTML on the AO3 -- they have to be the blank space that is showing, surely? -- and if so I would then be able to find-and-replace them one story at a time in the existing HTML, if I choose to.

[sholio]

I think you're right that Word's special ellipsis character got stripped out. I had something similar happen to my early stories with em-dashes, which were some sort of special character in the exported files from my word processor that I used on both ffnet and early AO3. At some point that got stripped out and I discovered when I went back to my first decade or so of stories on AO3 - my backdated ffnet archive, basically - that there are blank spaces where the em-dashes should be.

Personally I'm not concerned about it much. If I think of it, I fix it whenever I get a comment on an older story (and not all of them seem to have done it, it just depends on how I created the html - I think it's specifically the html export from that word processor). But I figure the stories are perfectly readable, they just look like they have a few run-on sentences, and I don't feel like it's a high priority to deal with. You could view it as a slow project to fix on an individual story basis, or just let it go; I think people are used to a few formatting errors in older stories anyway. I know I'm pretty forgiving when I'm reading old stories, even on AO3, because so much of the early stuff was clearly imported from somewhere else and sometimes comes in with borked formatting and similar.

[brightknightie]

Thank you very much for the insight and advice! I'll take it to heart and give myself permission to address it very slowly, or perhaps only in my favorite stories.

Yes, your described experience lines up with what I've observed. My em-dashes seem fine, doubtless because, until just last year, I always hand-inserted the HTML tags for em-dashes when posting to the AO3. But my ellipses are gone, because I never did that for ellipses; instead, I'd always replace them with 3 periods (old-timey habit from posting to ASCII email lists), and Word must have... "helpfully" re-ellipsis-ified them when I wasn't looking. :-)

[greerwatson]

I've not had any problems; but then I've been copy-pasting direct from Word on a fairly new computer, which will mean it came with a newish version of Word.

If you want to hard-code the ellipses back in, you can use the following:
& hellip ;
(Take the spaces out.)

If you are having trouble with your m-dashes, you can hard-code them as:
& mdash ;
(Again, take the spaces out.)

I'm used to hard-coding all these things, since I have to do it when creating webpages for my stories.

[brightknightie]

Thank you for your generosity in spelling those out for me! I appreciate your time and kind intent!

FWIW, I taught myself HTML in the '90s and CSS in the '00s, did freelance web design for a few years back in the day, and, as a volunteer, maintain a community non-profit's website even now. :-) I don't use my manual HTML skills for much besides the AO3 and DW anymore, but... I haven't entirely forgotten them. ;-)

[kalloway]

I don't remember any further details but a few years ago, AO3's html cleaners seemed to be really overzealous. I had to fix a lot of multi-line italics that it had mangled and as I've been archiving things from there lately, I'm still finding spots where it got hungry.

I do know that my old, old website (which I can't edit) has a lot of display errors that certainly weren't there a decade ago. So I'd guess you've been hit by a combo of hungry html-cleaners and deprecated code.

Up to you if you want to fix it, or if you just want to look at a fic now and then in your spare time just in case?

[brightknightie]

Thank you! I appreciate the added evidence on which to base decisions!

I think that I've decided to not launch a full-scale fix-it project -- too many other things going on -- but to start with the one identified and move forward in time to find the beginning of issues to scope the need, and then to slowly fix my favorites of the affected older pieces and hopefully learn some efficiencies, and move from there.