Formatting problems with a story submission

My story involves cybersex, and I am using italics to indicate chat sessions.

I put a test version of my story on Lit, without submitting it, to check the formatting. To my consternation, I found that after a certain point, the Lit software began to ignore the </I> command, and the remainder of the story was all in italics. I double checked to make sure that I had entered the command code properly, and indeed I had.

This is vexing, because I need to differentiate the narrative from the chat dialog. Does anyone have any idea what may be causing the problem?

AlwaysHungry said:

My story involves cybersex, and I am using italics to indicate chat sessions.

I put a test version of my story on Lit, without submitting it, to check the formatting. To my consternation, I found that after a certain point, the Lit software began to ignore the </I> command, and the remainder of the story was all in italics. I double checked to make sure that I had entered the command code properly, and indeed I had.

This is vexing, because I need to differentiate the narrative from the chat dialog. Does anyone have any idea what may be causing the problem?

Click to expand...

Don't use <I>text</I>, instead use <i>text</i>. And don't for get to close the tags as I have done here.

Argh. I changed them all to lower case <i> </i>, and the problem is still there.

I think I figured it out. I had individually italicized each line. I think that there may be a limit to how many formatting commands the Lit software will accept per story. I went through about two-thirds of the story and removed all the unnecessary italics commands, starting and stopping only at the beginning and end of a section of chat dialog. Now it is working properly.

AlwaysHungry said:

Argh. I changed them all to lower case <i> </i>, and the problem is still there.

Click to expand...

When I get a problem like this, it's usually because I've accidentally left out the / in a close-italics tag. Hard to spot when reading through the markup.

A quick way to check for that would be to do a word search on "<i>", see how many you have in the story, and then do the same for "</i>". If they don't match, that's your answer.

If it's not that, I got nothin'.

AlwaysHungry said:

I think I figured it out. I had individually italicized each line. I think that there may be a limit to how many formatting commands the Lit software will accept per story. I went through about two-thirds of the story and removed all the unnecessary italics commands, starting and stopping only at the beginning and end of a section of chat dialog. Now it is working properly.

Click to expand...

Yep, probably confused the preview software. It might have been okay if submitted as a real person looks at the text before posting and she might have rejected it because the number of html tags were excessive.

Only tag blocks of text. Why do all that extra work anyway?

I seemed to have a problem with something in the past where it lost all paragraph indents. I got a complaint from a reader that was pissed that the story looked like one long paragraph and I should learn how to use paragraphs. I checked and it looked ok to me. It may have been his/her computer. I use MS Word to copy and paste storied when I submit them. Perhaps some computers or other versions of Word miss the formatting. I know that some printers seem to have different page and space layout than mine when other people print things I've written. I don't have a good answer.

amofiga said:

I seemed to have a problem with something in the past where it lost all paragraph indents. I got a complaint from a reader that was pissed that the story looked like one long paragraph and I should learn how to use paragraphs. I checked and it looked ok to me. It may have been his/her computer. I use MS Word to copy and paste storied when I submit them. Perhaps some computers or other versions of Word miss the formatting. I know that some printers seem to have different page and space layout than mine when other people print things I've written. I don't have a good answer.

Click to expand...

I don't think they want indents at Lit. They want a line skipped between paragraphs. I recommend that you save your story as text and copy it in with no formatting whatsoever, except for HTML commands if you are familiar with them, for italics, bolding, and centering. If you attempt to use HTML commands for font face or coloring, your story will be rejected.

What Always said...

Lit doesn't use indents. It will actually get rid of any extra spaces in the entire story. Place an extra paragraph (return) between paragraphs.

Just like you see here.

New paragraph.

Another new paragraph.

You're not the first to be fooled by .DOC or .DOCX or .ODT or .RTF formatting vs. LIT. I always submit text pasted into the submission window. My Mozilla browser does its own spellcheck; this quickly supplements other spellcheckers. And I hit the PREVIEW button to see just how LIT digests that text. You can't preview a formatted file, only a pasted-text submission.

As mentioned, we delimit paragraphs here with an extra blank line. Other formatting can be done with a few HTML tags, which I use extensively. LIT allows these:

<b>bold</b>
<i>italic</i>
<u>underline</u>
<center>center<center>
<blockquote>indent 5</blockquote>