Original Work: ring the baker, the butcher, the charioteer by calypsid
Mass Effect: Regency AU, Shep/Garrus | Rating: General Audiences
Summary:
"That idiot pitched the driver off," Shepard says in her own language, her voice grim. "I saw him come off the box and go tumbling into the field a moment ago."
Garrus looks at her, dread in his heart. "And the odds that he knows how to handle a team of four?"
Shepard looks back, her mouth pressed tight, her lips white. That's all she needs to say.
Notes: ITPE 2024 treat for one of the incredible mods, @blackestglass, and for the lovely @avaniesque! This is the start of my little light [podfics] series, though I'm not sure when I'll be able to tackle the 20k second fic haha
I write in Scrivener, so I am starting with rich text that is not in the Windows environment. any writing program that is not Microsoft Word is on the same level. why does this matter? because Windows pasting to browsers is deficient in that it does not preserve rich text formatting unless it comes from Word. why? I have no fucking clue. but it's good to know. so I start with this:
Destiny! I love to hate it. you will note two instances of italicized text. now, as I'm the laziest bastard who rolled over the earth, I don't want to hand-code those to drop in AO3's HTML editor. (I don't use the rich text editor because on preview, it runs through the text and applies HTML codes for you, and in certain circumstances that can break formatting, such as if you're using a texting workskin or other custom formatting. if that's not a problem for you, you probably don't need this post.)
so, it gets copy-pasted into Microsoft Word:
(I am aware that this could be the same screenshot. I promise it's not. I just write in Calibri.)
then I open the Find/Replace dialogue:
make sure your cursor is in the Find What: box. click the Format button on the bottom left:
select Font...
under Font Style, select Italic and hit "OK".
now I'm going to work the actual magic. the HTML code for italics is <i> or <em> (they're the same thing). that means that when a browser sees that code, it treats any text wrapped in that code as italicized.
I just have to tell Word to find the italicized text and wrap it in my HTML.
in the Replace With: field, paste this:
<i>^&</i>
"^&" is the regex code for "the same text". so you're telling Word to find this text and replace it with itself and also the HTML.
looks like this. then hit "replace all". you're done.
copy the text from the word document and put it in the HTML posting box in AO3. that's all you have to do.
I've used a lot of words and probably made this sound like an ordeal, but I have the code memorized and I can do this in less than eight seconds. I'm not exaggerating.
you can do this with anything you can search for in that Font box: bold, strikethrough, etc. you can also do this with other formatting, but the codes for those are Word regex and it's not documented as well as regular regex. I'm willing to help! but those are the provisos.
