Tod Naturlich Stories ===================== Hello, and thank you for taking the time to see my stories. Before you proceed, there are two issues you have to be aware about the text files in this corner of the ASSTR ftp site: I write first in Spanish, than translate to English, and I write using LaTeX (https://latex-project.org), this results in some caveats about the text files (.txt) here presented. ASCII vs UTF-8 encoding ----------------------- Spanish has some symbols that English doesn't (specifically "áéíóúüñ ÁÉÍÓÚÜÑ¡¿") so I can't encode my stories using plain ASCII, the result could introduce some weird phrases, for example: * "Papá le pega" => "Dad is hitting him" * "Papa le pega" => "The potato is hitting him" * "Ella es mamá" => "She is my mother" * "Ella es mama" => "She is a breast" * "Tengo 10 años" => "I am 10 years old" * "Tengo 10 anos" => "I have 10 assholes" For this reason my stories in Spanish will be encoded using UTF-8, if you adjust your text reader to this (I would expect all modern text readers to already do this) all weird symbols should resolve into normal Spanish letters. Any story translated to English won't have any of this problems, and you can read it normally without worrying about the encoding. LaTeX formatting ---------------- LaTeX has a particular syntax in order to create beautiful pdf files, and since the text files (.txt) here presented are just stripped down versions of the LaTeX source code I use, they will include some weird looking character combinations. I decided to continue using this format, in part because then I don't have to worry about making changes to the story when I convert to text, and also because they allow me to include more complex (and correct) punctuation without using symbols outside ASCII. For the most part, this format codes are pretty obvious and don't distract form the reading: - => normal dash (also called hyphen) "-" -- => en-dash (a slightly longer dash) "–" --- => em-dash (a really big dash) "—" `` => Open double quote "“" '' => Close double quote "”" << => Open Spanish quote "«" >> => Close Spanish quote "»" But there are some that are a little more obtrusive: \dots{} => Ellipsis "…" I apologize in advance for any distraction this kind of format causes, I will try to keep the distracting ones to a minimum. Or, if you really want to read the story as I would, then go into the "Stories in PDF" and download the pdf, which is not only more beautiful, but also without any encoding or formatting problems.