★ the saltmaster extraordinaire

Found an excellent resource post on LJ by trovia, detailing how to get rid of AO3's automatic numbering of chapters via work-skin (very useful if you're in the habit of posting prologues and/or intermissions and can't deal with the constant annoyance that is 'Chapter 1: prologue'). It's a bit frustrating that AO3 doesn't have any sort of option for the user to define how chapter titles display, without having to resort to skins (Mediaminer, which is an absolutely ancient fic site, actually has the option to designate one chapter as the story prologue, something AO3 hasn't implemented to this day).

I wanted to embed the post here, to preserve it for myself in case something happens to LJ (can't say I have much faith in it being around for longer, as ad-infested and unusable as it's become) or the account is ever deleted, but I can't get the embed function to work on DW. So I'll copy the contents instead.

If this is useful to you in any way, do leave a comment on trovia's journal!

When you post fic with multiple chapters to AO3, AO3 automatically adds a "Chapter 1 / Chapter 2" etc. to your chapter title. That sucks a little if you've got a prologue, because you end up with such titles as "Chapter 2: Chapter 1 - Title Of Chapter". Asked the AO3 folks about it and got the following suggestion to circumvent this problem, thought I should share:

1. Log in to the Archive and go to http://ao3.org/skins
2. Select "Create Skin"
3. Change the Type to "Work Skin".
4. Enter a unique name for the skin.
5. In the CSS box, type or paste .chapter.preface h3.title {display: none;}
6. Select Submit

When you post a new work (or want to change an existing work), make sure to select the skin you just made in the Associations section. You can add in your own chapter titles by placing them within h3 tags as part of the text of the chapter. One thing to keep in mind though, work skins will not transfer over to downloads or subscription notifications, and users can override them by choosing the 'Hide Creator's Style' option. You can find more information about work skins here.