For my wotf story, I have my MC post to an online forum (like 5 seperate posts all at once). In standard manuscript format, what is the best way to set that apart? Do I change fonts? Indent? Increase right margin? Italics? Thanks!
Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :
In Vernor Vinge's FIRE UPON THE DEEP there is a lot of "internet" communication, and if I remember correctly, the publisher used a different font.
I don't know what he did in the manuscript, however--probably a style sheet, and that may be the best way to do it.
What you could also try is to format it more like a play script, where you have the name of the "poster" first with a colon as punctuation, and then what the poster posted.
USERNAME: And this is what I think about that.
That format is different enough from the regular text that it should be clear what you are doing. (Indenting such "posts" might be a good idea as well.)
Posted by Betsy Hammer (Member # 8139) on :
I'm not sure about this at all, but I think OSC told us in the writing class to center it and shrink the font to size 10. It was a long time ago, though, so don't trust me. He may have been talking about something else.
Posted by EricJamesStone (Member # 1681) on :
I would treat each post as a block quote. Start with a standard line break. Indent half an inch on both sides for the text of the forum post (including any post headers such as topic, date & author) and then another standard line break at the end of each forum post. After the final post, stop the extra indenting.
Posted by Pyre Dynasty (Member # 1947) on :
Ditto on the block quote thing. The tech-editor will figure out how it should work in print.
Posted by TamesonYip (Member # 9072) on :