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Question about text formatting/style

curson

Lieutenant Commander
Red Shirt
Hi all.
I'm crazy enough to decide that it's time for me to come back to writing, or at least to die trying to do it (it would be the first time in English, as my native language is Italian), and I'm putting together a project for a series of Fan-Fiction.

It's all very in the preliminary stage, but since it's Star Trek, it will have some "special" requirements in terms of styling, and being the control freak I tend to be, I want to lay down some basic rules for myself about that from this very early stage and I'd like your opinion on it :bolian:

One of my main concern is about dialogues.
Let's say I'll use the standard " " to enclose a normal dialogue. What about a communication one? Like something coming from off-ship through a comm badge, with one of the characters not present? I am used to something like this in the SIM I play in:

"Dialogue 1, character is present."

[[Answer, patched through comm-badge of communication link, voice only.]]

Do you think it would work as a style rule in a more "novel" type of text (than a SIM post)?

Also, what about the computer? Having it speaking as a "present character" doesn't seem completely the right approach, but I cannot decide on the delimitation signs to use: «», ** **, or something like this? Ideas?

I bet someone has already scratched this itch before me, any link/idea/answer will be appreciated, because I see that every author has different ideas on how to implement all of this.

Thanks.
 
Usually, when I have dialogue over a communicator, I have the lines of the "away" character italicized. Likewise, I italicize the voice of the computer. However, you should feel free to use the format with which you feel most comfortable, whether using punctuation marks or brackets. The key is consistency.
 
Yeah, I do what TheLoneRedshirt does and use italics for the other half of the communication (unless it's a conversation with a viewscreen, then I just write it as normal conversation) and also for the computer. Basically "disembodied voice" gets italics

But there's no hard and fast rule. Whatever works best for your story. We'll quickly figure it out :)
 
I thought about that, but the idea is to keep it as HTML and thus formatting free as possible. Even if I'll put the story up to my website once I'll feel ready to publish them, my aim is to have them as much as simple text as possible. That's why I was looking to find a way to find a style without the use of Bold, Italic or similar.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, if the [[ ]] and whatever else I'll come up with will not satisfy me, I'll try your pick too :)
 
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