Hey everyone~!
I know I haven't been around in a while so sorry for that and thanks for having me back! I've missed this place ;_;.
Anyhow, I just wanted to get a feel for what you all think about formatting lyrics, since we now have some for both the anime OP/EDs (which probably should have their own Music subcat now?) and the musical numbers.
At first I had just stuck in the lyrics for the musicals plainly like on The Truth Reborn. This is probably not the greatest layout haha.
Some good folks here have kindly input the lyrics for the anime theme songs in a chart format such as for Reason.
Pros:
- chart layout displays properly on mobile
- all languages can be seen side by side
Cons:
- sometimes on desktop there's a bunch of whitespace that appears in some columns so language lines don't line up as they do on mobile
- it's tougher to see where lines start and end on mobile due to screen space
After hanging out a bit on the Sailor Moon Wiki, I found a tabber layout looked really nice on desktop, which I've formatted to I Love You as an example.
Pros:
- clearer where lines start and end on mobile
- looks cleaner on desktop
Cons:
- tabbers don't display on mobile (basically at all), effectively making it look like my original plain format for The Truth Reborn and thus requiring a heading label to separate the information instead of being able to rely on the tabber text.
Personally, I feel like if we could remove the extra whitespace on desktop of the format like on Reason, that would be the best look, but I don't know if it's possible OTL. But, what do you guys think is better? If I've missed any pros or cons to the options we currently have, feel free to add them in your comment as well! I'm not on a lot of other wikis either so maybe someone has a suggestion they've seen work well elsewhere...
Anyways your input is really appreciated before I go forward with more edits to the musical numbers! As a bonus, it would be nice to agree on a style and have it added to the Manual of Style or Article Structure pages for future.
Diagnosed as Sound 19:44, October 20, 2019 (UTC)
- chirp chirp... So... ^^;;... In the meantime I've developed a bit of an alternative table format here. It's definitely less straightforward in terms of just getting the info on the page, but I think it does a somewhat better job of presenting the lyrics in three different "languages". It is quite a difficult problem to solve, as it turns out.
- The crux of the challenge is space constraints. With three language columns competing for space and a constraint on the table width due to the site layout, being able to see everything at a glance is very difficult. There needs to be space for the eye to parse the separate lines. Since the chart has to be squished horizontally, the only other space available is vertical, so that's what my alternative provides, hopefully while still remaining somewhat compact. Initially, I wanted to get something that looked more like what animelyrics.com has [for example], but they have no page width constraints and actually have chosen to display their kanji/kana lyrics separately so their lyrics look clean and lined up with no challenge OTL.
- Using separate table rows to align each line of the song to its' corresponding other language introduces more spacing between lines, especially where in Japanese the line of the song only takes one text line, while the English takes two, which isn't exactly ideal. (It led me to choose horizontal rules to separate stanzas in order to make those breaks clearer compared to the line breaks.) But then, *not* using separate rows for each lyric line often makes it hard to see what part of the Japanese stanza matches what part of the English stanza. This is true even if there is one row per stanza (which I tried) instead of just one big row for each language as there currently is on the Reason page.
- Any thoughts would be awesome! It doesn't do anything funny in mobile display besides showing the table borders thankfully... Please have a look and let me know if you think I'm close or wildly off-base XD.
- --Diagnosed as Sound 03:37, April 6, 2020 (UTC)
- I don't have much to say on this as it seems perfectly fine to me at least aesthetically. I'm not exactly fluent in Japanese (then again I recently took a quiz on CSS with pretty much only my experiences on this wiki, and I scored in the median, so who knows what "fluent" really means), so I can't really speak on the actual pros and cons of lining up each line by language one-on-one. capefeather (talk) 00:41, April 10, 2020 (UTC)