Text format options to simulate phone chat/text apps

Hello, I did try to search through the suggestion already made but didn't see this.

I'd love a way to format text in my stories to easily show a SMS or chat discussion between characters, but in a simple and attractive format. Currently I use a combination of italics and bold to show it, like:

Zoe: hey joe, thanks for the nice messages back! i’m dancing in a new club tonight but wanted to talk to you
Zoe: …i’ll be honest, Mandy txted me u were at paradise for dinner lol

JM: Thanks Zoe, it would have been nice to see you dance again, of course, but the meal was pretty good

This works well enough, but it's a nuisance and still doesn't look very good... and being fussy I also can't use italics to demonstrate a characters internal dialogue in the same chapter to avoid confusion. I find the text options for viewing stories on CHYOA are strange and if I am using the dark background it's almost impossible to see bold text on my browser, and even italics is weirdly hard to see, so I worry it's lost. A way to cleanly indent lines by a few spaces would be great, so I could show the chat as a block of text without it being a block quote or an unordered list (which doesn't work well for typed chat dialogue) etc.

And while I'm wishing, being able to put emojis into the story would really make my life easier when I'm writing about characters talking to each other over their devices Or a chat window template to let you show the dialogue that way, but I can understand that most folks prefer to have the text of the chapter be text only instead of a simulated chat window which would basically be like a screenshot.

Hope this made sense!

 

I'm not sure if there will ever be additions to "modify" Markdown.

That said, there are some workarounds

If you're content with simply indenting the line, you could use em-spaces or en-spaces (most whitespace characters should work)

Code:

em-space -> <-

(I haven't yet found a way to produce them with my keyboard, so I copy them from a chapter or Wiki.)

If the line breaks, the second line will start at the very left, so that only works for very short lines.
Though you could break the lines manually so that it might look like a message or note. (You can see two examples in this chapter.)

If the sentences are longer, you could use Markdown to format it. (I'm not sure if this works with RTE activated.)

Code:

| | |
|---|---|
| |Zoe: hey joe, thanks for the nice messages back! i’m dancing in a new club tonight but wanted to talk to you|
| |Zoe: …i’ll be honest, Mandy txted me u were at paradise for dinner lol|
| | |
| |JM: Thanks Zoe, it would have been nice to see you dance again, of course, but the meal was pretty good|

Now, if you want to display a conversation similar to WhatsApp, you can use this:

Code:

| |            |   |
|---|:---|---|
| |hey joe, thanks for the nice|   |
| |messages back! i’m dancing|   |
| |in a new club tonight but|   |
| |wanted to talk to you|   |

| |            |   |
|---|:---|---|
| |…i’ll be honest, Mandy txted|   |
| |me u were at paradise for|   |
| |dinner lol|   |

| |   |            |
|---|---|---:|
| |   |Thanks Zoe, it would have|
| |   |been nice to see you dance|
| |   |again, of course, but the|
| |   |meal was pretty good|

These are Markdown tables.
The first column is to indent the whole conversation
The empty line between each table is necessary. Otherwise, Markdown will think it is one table instead of two/three.
The header line is basically empty but necessary to define the overall width. Basically only necessary for the one who writes on the right side. The syntax of the first two tables could be cut off after the third |.
The line between the header and the "body" defines the vertical alignment of the text within the table.
(Not all em-spaces are needed, though having them that way makes it easier to manually break the lines.)
(There could be additional columns for the time.)
In this case, you also have to create linebreaks manually and the length of each line must be shorter than the header line. Otherwise, the right sides of the right chatter won't align.
If the screen of the reader is too small, the manually broken lines will break once again and it might look quite ugly. So you should make sure that the width of the content in the table isn't too wide.

This is possible to a degree.
There are the standard emojis like ☺, ☻, and ♥, but you can also use some (colored) Unicode Emojis. (Please don't try to drag and drop other images into chapters. That won't work and might mess up with the chapter.)

See the bottom of CHYOA Guide: Chapter Formatting for some examples.
If someone creates a list of Unicode Emojis that are working on CHYOA, I'd be happy to add them to the guide.

 

Whoa that's incredibly helpful, thank you!
The markdown tables are most of what I wanted honestly, the slight indentation alone is hugely beneficial to the visual look I'm going for. Guess I'm using markdown now hah!

I guess I can buckle down and use the default emojis, but I only ever saw the heart one and it looked weird so I never realized there was more I could use in the text editor. I just use ascii smilies, which gives my chat messages a lofi look I don't mind but it's probably not how most people, especially younger ones, chat with each other nowadays ;D >_< :-o