# How do you upload your writing on FA



## Rivalawless (Mar 31, 2017)

I've always had issue's uploading it, most times the user would have to download the pdf or whatever to even read the story.


----------



## FluffyShutterbug (Mar 31, 2017)

I did a little looking, and I think it might have to do with the format used. I found a story that was displayed on the site itself, and it was a Text File (.txt). I hope that helps.


----------



## jayhusky (Mar 31, 2017)

Since inception, the site has only supported .txt files to be parsed directly on the site. Other formats, such as .docx, .doc and .pdf are hosted but have to be downloaded to view them.

Unfortunately that is how the site works for now, there are one or two ways around it but they require the use of userscripts to add bits of functionality to the site.
An example is the "FA TextViewer" script I wrote for the site. It embeds a reader into the page so the user can read the submission without needing to download the file.
If you want the script you can download it from the link in my signature.


----------



## FluffyShutterbug (Mar 31, 2017)

Oh! I recently posted a story to the site under the .docx format. Do you think I would get more traffic if I re-uploaded it as a .txt file?


----------



## jayhusky (Mar 31, 2017)

Since txt is parsed directly, you could resubmit the file in that format if you wanted to, in order to get more views etc.

One other benefit of txt files, is they work with 99% of the bbcode the site supports.


```
for example you can use the following codes in your txt file and the site will interpret them correctly.

[b]yourtexthere[/b]
[i]yourtexthere[/i]
[u]yourtexthere[/u]
[s]yourtexthere[/u]
```

I don't know if spoiler tags and header tags work in the txt parser yet however.


----------



## FluffyShutterbug (Mar 31, 2017)

I feel a little guilty for sort of hijacking this thread, but I re-submitted my story as a .txt, and for some reason, a bunch of the punctuation were replaced by this weird question mark glyph. What should I do?


----------



## quoting_mungo (Apr 1, 2017)

FluffyShutterbug said:


> I feel a little guilty for sort of hijacking this thread, but I re-submitted my story as a .txt, and for some reason, a bunch of the punctuation were replaced by this weird question mark glyph. What should I do?


Resave your TXT file in a different text format (off the top of my head I believe UTF-8 is the encoding you want, but I'm not at home so I can't double-check), or replace special characters (usually the problem will be with curly quotes/apostrophes) with "plain" ones (eg straight quotes/apostrophes). To minimize the risk of your submission being corrupted, make sure the file name remains the same if you replace your original submission with an edited file.

For a text editor that will let you select encoding, I can recommend Notepad++. It will even run off a USB stick if you need it to.


----------

