Fonts and styling

Fonts can be nice - but they’re pretty clunky. We have other secret formatting too.

We could do something about that.

One thing I’m interested in is the separation of styling and content. So bold is bold. Fair enough. But it’s also usually used for speech on GP. I was toying with the idea of allowing it to have attributes - maybe via a dropdown.

[b="shout"]make this bigger[/b]
[b="whisper elvish"]multiple attributes.
 Whisper is smaller, maybe grey. 
Elvish is a font[/b]
[b="robot quote"]a system font,
 maybe in a frame[/b]

Dunno. I’ve been wondering about it for a while, but the recent Legend discussion made me think I should surface some of my half-baked ideas.

Not a fan. Maybe the snippets again that used to be part of the expansion so people can make their own. But I don't really want to have every post be a variety of different font sizes and colors. It'll just look bad and overdone. And having a dropdown with "Shout", "Whisper" and all that would encourage that kind of thing.

(On hearing about annoying things that are overdone, Adam quietly slid his animated gif selector out of sight)

I think those are great ideas! There doesn't need a bunch, maybe 5-10 presets to allow folks to do things that can sometimes be a hassle, or just to save a few steps. "Shout" and "whisper" are great examples. It might pay dividends to put the question out to the users, "What kind of presets would you like or would use if they were available?"

Please no.

Surprised this isn't getting more support. You folks don't think even a simple shout/whisper function would have value among users?

What about just a drop-down for 3 or 4 different font sizes to make that an easier tool to use? Or a handful of fonts to choose from?

I want my players to use their words to portray shouting and whispering, not formatting.

There is already a problem with players neglecting to use inverted-commas or to type '"..." she said listlessly', and just using bold to show that PCs are speaking, from past experience I fear that this will just amplify that.

I see your point, but where's the line between offering features to users because they make the site more feature-rich/interesting and not adding features because we personally don't like how users might use them?

I agree, I'd prefer players to use grammar more often, but if a feature allows a player to communicate with more.nuance, even if it's not what you'd expect to see in a novel, shouldn't we encourage that? And haven't we already crossed that line by allowing gifs, images, and emoticons?

We already largely have this, so making it easier would be great.
Aniron font
Aniron font

I would rather think about adapting the existing abuse of the [ color] tag into a [ css] tag for general use. Remove the need for the ; terminator and the injection bug and allow the users to enter whatever CSS they like.

They can do that already, we may as well make it easier.

I'm completely with vague on this. I hate this idea.
Well, I'm against this feature because for me, I think it would make the experience of using the site actively worse (unless people ignore it completely, which I doubt, in which case it would not improve).
I know that's subjective but isn't the whole point of this group to give our opinions on potential changes? By this logic, we could just say "Adam, implement everything you can think of. No questions asked"

Thumbs down from my corner as well. Though I would probably support more of a WYSIWYG editor that had fonts, colors, sizes all built into it...

Right, not saying we're not doing our duty by offering opinions here, I was more getting at that it might be prudent to consider less what we personally would like/dislike, thinking instead what users would enjoy. For instance, the new emoticons. Personally, I'd rather leave emoticons out of the whole thing, but a lot of people seem to like them.

😲

Right. And people can do what they want. But should we encourage it by adding a "Add 😱 to indicate that your character is surprised" button?

If someone wants to increase font size on their posts when their character is shouting, I'm not saying I'll try to stop them. I don't like when people use colored text for dialog but I don't bring it up when someone does (unless the color is unreadable, which should happen less now thanks to the dark mode color update).

But if we add that as a feature to the post creator, we are saying: "This is how you're supposed to do it"

In my opinion everyone has their style; one likes to dress up their text and add emojis, others prefer to keep it simple. Personally, I'd alternate between the two, depending on where and when I'm posting. At lunch break, I'd keep it quick and simple. DMing might bring out a more artsy aspect of text formatting.

It is my firm opinion that users would not enjoy this in the long run. They may think it is a cool feature, but the quality of games will go down, which will result loss of enjoyment.

This is actually my biggest problem with PbP over Discord (or whatsapp, or whatever). Both the ease of posting from a phone, and the inclusion of reactions (which could be brilliant, if used to show support for a player and not for in-character stuff) reduce the quality of the game.

I constantly have to rebuke the players for falling back into social media habits and not using proper words or all the letters. Their argument is that I am a dinosaur (which is apparently not the complement it sounds like:) and that "that is how people speak", I have less of this when not using things that look like the tools they use all the time.

The more we make this feel like one of those sites, the less it feels like a PbP RPG site, and the less value it has for me.

That is just my personal opinion, based on doing this for decades. But I can easily find another place to play if it comes to that.
Precisely. If there are buttons for having our character do a thing (shout/whisper) then the we are saying to the users that that is how they do the thing. /wave /bow /leave ...

I don't want to have to keep telling the players in my game to "please use your words" when the software is 'officially' telling them "use this button".

I can see definitely see your points. I might disagree with parts of them, but we can agree to disagree and move on.

What bothers me is having tools available that are "hidden." I love that fonts and sizes are able to be used, but they shouldn't be a hidden feature that you have to research to use.

What about just a simple drop-down tool for font soEs and styles? No incentive to use them, at least no more than a regular word processor would have.

I agree that font size should just be included alongside bold, italics et cetera. Maybe something like "align right" and "align center as well.