So I got curious. How long, I wondered, would it actually take me to convert an existing, full-length, originally-in-plain-text story?

Well, in the case of The Legacy of Korra Book 6 Chapter 1, An Avatar in New Avalon (215K, plain text), about two and a half hours. Much of that time, after getting all the incidental bits (time stamps, song cues, etc.) properly marked up, was taken up with tedious groveling around for hyphen-delimited (and thus not practically searchable) emphasis (which I'm sure I've missed a bunch of in the first pass).

So, uh, yeah, I don't think a full conversion of the back catalog is on the cards.

However! One thing I came to suspect during the process is that if I wrote the way I do when I'm writing for the Forum - with incidental markup (italics and whatnot) happening in line, but not worrying about the paragraph tags and all that junk until after - that... might actually work. I'm not certain; further experimentation is definitely called for. (One potential problem is that that's all well and good when I'm writing, but it's a pretty fiddly business to expect of collaborators, and then I'm back to groveling around doing the conversions by hand again.)

However, if that suspicion is correct, though, the process might be adaptable to CSS compliance in future pieces. I make no promises, but it's a thing I am investigating.

In the meantime, hey, that's everything on the Legacy page.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I don't know what text editor you work with, but Notepad++ on Windows has usefully robust regex search capabilities. I believe that using a search and replace with the regex option, using the text between the double quotes, would have the desired effect:

Find: "(\s)-(\w+)-(\s)"
Replace with: "\1<i>\2</i>\3"

Doing that on the text for "An Avatar in New Avalon" makes 99 replacements, and searching for <i> doesn't look like it yielded false positives, at least.

Hmm, I'll have to try that; I don't use that editor, but the one I do use does regular expressions too (which is how I was able to semi-automate paragraph wrapping, albeit only to a point). The emphasis thing is only one of several tedious things about reformatting a long plaintext piece (it's an involved enough process that even with better automation, repackaging the whole giant back catalog's simply not going to happen), but it would certainly help. Thanks.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Hypothetically speaking, if you had a program that took Eyrie-standard .txt and converted it to HTML for you in one gulp -- possibly requiring spot checks and adjustments afterward if there was any unusual formatting, but no line-by-line proofreading -- how much of that process would be left?

I'm pretty sure that program could be written. I don't have time to do it myself, but I think other people have mentioned having already written approximations to it. (The hardest part, in my mind, would be the two-column end-titles-with-music pattern.)

Hypothetically speaking, probably a lot, because A) there's a lot of formatting in your average UF story that I don't think would lend itself well to automatic styling (flashbacks, asides, what have you) and B) I would almost certainly wind up doing the line-by-line proofreading anyway. Any sort of automation tools would be a help, certainly, but I don't think a completely fire-and-forget solution is feasible.

Honestly, converting the back catalog is simply not on the table. Way better things to do. Right now, I'm in the process of considering whether the creative process can coexist with the style sheet for purposes of making new material. I'm not sure it can, the way I do it - I tend to leave a lot of in-progress notes strewn around the files as I work on them, and having to mark those up just so they won't break the output strikes me as a bit naff - but I'm looking at it.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.