History Main / UnconventionalFormatting

** ''Literature/TheFamiliar'' is a projected 27-volume series. The first volume, ''One Rainy Day in May'', has been released at 880 pages. It would be absolutely ridiculous coming from this author for all those pages to just be text played straight, not to mention how long it would take to write that much content, so it's pretty much expected by all of Danielewski's fans that he's going to be playing with the text in various ways throughout the extremely long piece.

* A poem where this trope is justified would be "Die Trichter" (The Funnels) by Christian Morgenstern. The words are arranged in the shape of a funnel. (Surely the most widely known example, at least in Germany, but not the only one.)

* An original early ''ElfQuest'' comic had a hand-lettered foreword on the inside front cover in the shape of a wolf's head.

* ''WebOriginal/LightsInTheDarkness'' - a story [[http://www.guildcompanion.com/scrolls/2002/feb/lights.html published]] in he Guild COmpanion, uses three different fonts of the same typeface to give a conversastion of three people. Italic is a small child, the normal typeface is the granny and late in the story, the grandfather is depicted with bold letters.

[[center: ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin. [[superscript:A literary trope]] in which the text is arranged on the page in strange ways, including but not limited to: right-to-left (in Western works), bottom-to-top, reversed, upside-down etc.]] It can also make use of [[color:red:colours]], [[AC:multiple UsefulNotes/{{Fonts}}]] and other @@typographical tricks of this nature.@@

* Used in {{Forward}} to illustrate River's unbalanced state of mind.

** The author does have a tendency to do this. In another of his books, TheThirteenAndAHalfLivesOfCaptainBluebear, the character is approached by a giant spider. The onomatopoesia used to descripe this apporach is 'boom!' in constantly increasing letter size, until the word covers a complete page.

** And for that matter, Harlan ''himself'' has used the technique in a few stories ("Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" and "Literature/IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream", among others).

** ''Literature/TheFamiliar'', although not yet released, is supposedly going to be a 27-volume-long series with the first book being 880 pages long. It would be absolutely ridiculous coming from this author for all those pages to just be text played straight, not to mention how long it would take to write that much content, so it's pretty much expected by all of Danielewski's fans that he's going to be playing with the text in various ways throughout the extremely long piece.

The technical name for this is [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_literature ergodic literature]], from the Greek ''ergon'', meaning "work", and ''hodos'', meaning "path" - that is, [[spoiler: formatting in which a great deal of work is required on the part of the reader to find a "path" through the text.]]

* In the setting of Creator/KJParker's novella "Purple and Black", purple ink is made from very rare and expensive ingredients and is nearly impossible to counterfeit, so it is reserved for Imperial missives to help verify their authenticity. The novella is an [[EpistolaryNovel Epistolary Story]] told through a series of back-and-forth letters between the Emperor and his top General. Appropriately, in the original printing of the novella, all of the Emperor's letters are printed in purple ink. (This is not the case for the version later printed in the ''Academic Exercises'' anthology, though.)

* JasperFforde uses this a lot in the ''Literature/ThursdayNext'' books particularly. Justified in that much action takes place in the Book World, with eraser bullets that reduce literary characters to text, locations like the Text Sea, and so on.

* Website/TimeCube changes the font, font size, usage of italics, etc. every single segment of the page. It also uses red and/or blue colored text fairly regularly - the effect is dizzying.

* Mark Z. Danielewski:

** Danielewski's next novel, ''Literature/OnlyRevolutions'', makes use of other tricks like this: more extensive use of colours, a "sidebar" in the left margin of every page and... well, [[http://booksloveliza.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/onlyrevolutions2.jpg?w=700 see for yourself.]]
* ''Literature/{{Trainspotting}}'' uses slightly unusual textual layouts whilst the protagonist is [[spoiler: hallucinating due to heroin withdrawal]].

** At one point, Homestuck splits into [[http://www.mspaintadventures.com/ACT6ACT5ACT1x2COMBO.php?s=6&p=007688 ''two pages of the comic per web page'']], displaying them as two different columns, which allows larger pictures to be shown with half of their pieces on one column and half of them on the other. Naturally, the ==> arrows on the left column tilt upwards, since they direct the reader to the other side of the web page.

** [=AnD tHeN tHeRe ArE tHe=] [[MST MsTiNgS]] [=wItH=] [[Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000 tOrGo]].

* WebOriginal/SCPFoundation has numerous articles where the typical format is [[InterfaceScrew disrupted]] by the InUniverse effects of the object involved.

[[Folder: WebOriginal]]

** [=AnD tHeN tHeRe ArE tHe=] [[MSTing MsTiNgS]] [=wItH=] [[Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000 tOrGo]].

* ''Literature/TristramShandy'' is probably the UrExample.

A subtrope of PaintingTheMedium. Sometimes used in MetaFiction and [[ScrapbookStory Scrapbook Stories]]. If employed throughout a work it may be a kind of ConstrainedWriting. See also FootnoteFever (with which this sometimes overlaps), AllLowercaseLetters, NoPunctuationPeriod, RainbowSpeak, CensorBox, BoldInflation, ColorCodedForYourConvenience and PageTurnSurprise. May be used for TranslationPunctaution.