2 years ago, I wrote a blog post about writing. Or rather, how not to write. How, when writing, I’d do anything else than the actual writing.
Writing about Writing
Now that 2024 is nearing its end, I finally have a proper writing setup that I'm happy to share. To my greatest surprise, it’s on a platform that I’ve been gravitating around and using now and then for a decade: Dropbox Paper. It only needed a couple of tweaks to reach the stars, and here we are.
It all started about a year ago. I was writing a John Titor 2K fanfiction on Paranormalis, and the more I was re-reading it, the more it looked like shit…
Let me explain. It felt like I was reading walls of texts. Dialogues were hard to spot and even harder to follow. Forum threads aren’t meant to convey the feeling and comfort a book does. It didn’t work.
At that point, I decided that I would create a bunch Post Format BBCodes on the forum, that would turn my poorly assembled fanfiction, into a seamless digital eBook, hosted within the forum.
Here’s what it looked like with the default forum view. Ew…
Let’s ignore the line-spacing. What do we notice? No tabs, the font is a sans-serif type of font-family. The image takes all the place. The chapter title is tiny. It looks fine for a forum discussion. But for a story that needs to be captivating and engaging, not so much…
And here it is with the novel template:
Pure magic. Suddenly, you’re no longer reading a story someone dumped in a forum thread. You’re reading a digital novel. It feels awesome. It feels serious and credible. It feels real!
To achieve this style, I had to study how book formatting works. Figuring out stuff like common book font families, font sizes, different headings, proper indentations, chapter tags, footers, headers. The whole typography-thing. You name it. Recreate a full-fledged book format, in CSS.
After a lot of pondering, I finally chose Alegreya as my font of choice. It’s the closest I could find to physical novels I had at home. Books like Lord of the Rings, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s an awesome font.
So, I went ahead, transcribed a couple of pages from these books, into my template, and made sure it would all fit together. Proper number of words per line, adequate spacing between lines, and such.
I even went as far as taking a picture of a novel page, transcript it in my template, then overlap both versions, to ensure my template was flawless and solid.
After a couple of iterations, I got what I wanted, and it felt great. Still does. It has to wow quality and readability a forum thread doesn’t have, and doesn’t need to have.
Here’s a snippet of the final product, featuring a title page and a page from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. 100% hosted on Paranormalis, a XenForo community.
Alright, let’s get back to our original topic. Let’s talk about writing environments. This forum template I showed you works and looks great. It couldn’t possibly look better. But guess what? It’s a display template, not a writing environment.
So with all this new knowledge of books, typography and formatting rules in mind, I turned to Google Docs, to create an editable version. A Google Docs template that would make me feel like I’m writing an actual book.
As you’ll notice, it looks identical as its CSS counterpart on the forum. Only this time, it’s in Google Docs:
I used this template for a couple of months to write. It works and feels great. But as usual, something wasn’t quite right and it’s all I could see. I started to struggle with the whole black-on-white thing. It was hurting my eyes, no matter how light or dark the room around me was. And obviously, inverting the colors didn’t solve it…
So off I was, looking for a new writing environment… AGAIN!
I ended up switching back to Dropbox Paper again. Their dark style is pretty good, and it’s an amazing Markdown writing app. I love it. But I was missing the Alegreya font! Still, I kept using it for a while.
I also wrote on BigHugeLabs’s Writer for a bit. It’s a great writing app. Unfortunately, its Markdown support isn’t on par with Dropbox Paper, so I can’t help but feel like it’s lacking. Notice how the tabs are weird in the example below. That’s too bad.
Other than that, Writer feels awesome. But that was a deal-breaker.
Once again, I was lost. I wanted to use Writer, but I wasn’t happy with its Markdown.
Then it struck me! EUREKA!
There exists Google Chrome plugins to modify websites on-the-fly. Stylus is one of them. It’s basically a CSS injector that allows you to modify a site to your liking. It’s 100% client-side, so you can go all sorts of weird changes.
That’s how I decided to modify Dropbox Paper and make it look and feel like BigHugeLabs’s Writer! What an adventure!
Here’s the final result, my dream writing environment, in its ultimate form. Dropbox Paper version 2.0.
As you’ll notice, I took a couple of liberties here and there. I added a background, some transparency and blur. And a lot of green. Not just any green… The Paranormalis Green! #60a01c baby!
I also switched the font to Candara. I can’t explain exactly why, but I seem to prefer it to Alegreya for writing. They’re kind of similar, but they have some pretty obvious differences. Still, I find Candara to be way easier on the eyes on the long run.
I’ve been writing with this setup for a couple of weeks now and it feels amazing. It’s the most productive I’ve been in a long time. Finally… IT WORKS! Here I am, plowing through this blog post that’s now over a thousand words. Way more than I envisioned at first.
Here's to thousands more words written in 2025!
See you next time!
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