What To Do With a Formatting Snafu?

[MMisterEE]

I submitted a freshly edited version of a story chapter ("Dreams To Come 01"), to eliminate a couple of bothersome punctuation errors. Lo and behold, the new cleaned-up version has some rogue spaces between some paragraphs. They don't show up in my text file, so who knows where they came from. It's like this:

"Blah blah blah," she said.

"Blah blah?"



"Blah!"

It's that jump in space between lines that's the problem (obviously the dialogue would be a problem, too, if that was an accurate example). It never happens during a sentence, only between paragraphs, and only occasionally. Would space jumps like that put you off while reading? Is it worth submitting an even newer edited version, which might or might not even fix the problem, or possibly introduce some new unseen gremlin?

 

[Darkniciad]

Post up a link, and I'll look through the HTML code to see if I can determine what's triggering the extra spaces.

 

[sr71plt]

I'm not sure I'd bother to fix that sort of mistake (because it could just introduce other, possibly worse mistakes) or that it would bother me much as a reader. I might think initially you were trying to mark the start of a separate section, but it should become obvious soon that you weren't.

 

[poppy_cock]

I agree with Sr that it's not really bothersome to the reader so I wouldn't fix it unless it's really bugging you (which I guess it might be). I took a look at the HTML code and this is one of the bits affected.

"David, it's true that you're dreaming. But that means I'm what?"<br />
<br />
<i> </i><br />
<br />
<i>Not real</i>, I think. Essentially what I'm reading as Sophie is nothing more than a memory.<br />

It looks like there was originally something in italics on the line after "But that means I'm what?"

So that line has remained in the formatting - even though there's nothing there between <i> and </i> anymore.

HTML code...

 

[lance gt]

That's happened to several of mine too, MM. My story was written and checked and for some reason, it had those same spaces. I thought it might have happened because of my own editing, and as such, the bots that post the story, read the edit and printed it out that way. Not sure if that's the case, but it made sense to me when I noticed that was where I had made the edit myself. I left it as is and let the reader just carry on reading, as it didn't interupt the flow of it.

 

[Darkniciad]

One of the benefits of submitting in .txt with the tags added manually. Those stray bits that you've decided didn't fit in the story that leave behind formatting artifacts vanish when you strip it down into a text file.

Try doing a find for italics as your last action before you submit the story. Just click through and next them unless you see it stop where there's nothing in italics. I do this for another site where I submit in HTML, because the converters in Word and Wordperfect both do the same thing.

Suspected that was the problem, but the lit text cruncher has some odd little quirks, so it could have been something new to send off in a bug report to Manu.

 

[SixtyMinuteMan]

Okay, another question for those of you who understand the HTML: The lower part of this page is centered, everything below the three lines that are actually supposed to be. When I submit the edit, should I ask them to fix that or just take out the centered text entirely, make it simple italicized text on the end of the line leading up to it?

What I know about HTML you could write on my smallest fingernail and have room left over for your autobiography, so I appreciate any advice.

 

[Darkniciad]

Okay, another question for those of you who understand the HTML: The lower part of this page is centered, everything below the three lines that are actually supposed to be. When I submit the edit, should I ask them to fix that or just take out the centered text entirely, make it simple italicized text on the end of the line leading up to it?

What I know about HTML you could write on my smallest fingernail and have room left over for your autobiography, so I appreciate any advice.

Quick Q, to try to narrow some things down. In what format are you submitting your stories?

Edit to Add: *Jumping up and down for joy, because he sees that they finally fixed the blockquote bug*

Edit II: Electric Boogaloo: Okay, found a centered story of mine. It isn't the presentation, because mine is centered properly ( with that bug that changed the font size/face fixed for center as well WOOT! ) and the centering ends exactly where it's supposed to.

 

[SixtyMinuteMan]

I submitted it as a .doc. I'd submit as text if I grokked how to put in italics and such, but I'm not there yet.

I actually write on OpenOffice, so the story began life as an .odf, if that matters.

 

[Darkniciad]

I submitted it as a .doc. I'd submit as text if I grokked how to put in italics and such, but I'm not there yet.

I actually write on OpenOffice, so the story began life as an .odf, if that matters.

I have the distinct feeling that this one has too many variables to track down without actually being behind the Lit curtain. It could be cross-platform issues when saving something centered as a .doc, or another artifact issue from making changes to the centered text.

The HTML is odd. It uses a new paragraph tag and center tag for each line of the three you wanted centered -- but doesn't use closing tags for any of them.

Lit typically generates one <p> tag at the beginning of the story, and one </p> at the end. Likewise, it generates one center tag for each block of centered text, and one closing tag at the end of each block.

This one is making the presentation of your story potentially annoying for readers, unlike the last one that probably breezes by the eyes. If it was me, I'd eliminate the potential for errors and go plain text with manual formatting. Not only does it strip out the formatting from the word processor ( including weird artifacts ), you can preview it before you submit, and see how it's going to look ( more or less ) once up on the website.

If you want, you can send me a PM and I'll whip you my email addy. You can send me the file and I'll convert it to plain text with the HTML tags inserted. Then you'll have an example that you can keep around, if you ever want/need to do it yourself, and you can submit that version to elimante the existing center bug once and for all, beyond any shadow of a doubt.

I might just be able to track down the formatting snafu and guess how it came about, too.

 

[MMisterEE]

Thanks for the responses. I hadn't noticed at first that the spaces only occur when the next line is about to begin with italics.

And checking further into the story, I'm horrified to find even worse issues. After several "pages" of text, the formatting is breaking down so that the lines begin irregularly on the page. I just tried copying a few lines as an illustration for here, but they cleaned up when copied. But visually in story now it's crap — a line suddenly beginning in the middle of the page, and it goes on for a while. it's horribly jarring.

So, for a not-so-savvy techie, what are my options? I saved the document as a .doc attachment that was manually uploaded, because italics are important to parts of the storytelling. The problems didn't exist the first time I submitted it, and it's appearing in places that were never tinkered with in the editing. With the first problem alone (a space every now and then) my instinct would be to let it slide and hope it doesn't bother readers too much. But with the formatting breaking down more spectacularly, I have to resubmit the chapter. What format will allow the italics where needed, but be the most gremlin-proof?

 

[poppy_cock]

If it's only italics you want, they're pretty easy in html. Put <i> before the word(s) you want italicised and </i> at the end.

I submit all my stories in the cut and paste box though I've always used a fairly convoluted method of getting them there. I write in Microsoft Word, then copy and paste the lot into a Notepad doc, making sure that word wrap isn't on. This has the effect of removing all formatting glytches - well, it does for me, anyway - so that when I copy and paste the Notepad doc into the cut and paste box, all is well. Then it's just a question of putting in the <i> and </i> where I want them. You don't have to use any other HTML code to get the paragraphs / line breaks in the right place.

The great thing about submitting in the cut and paste box is that you can hit 'preview' to see what it's all gonna look like on the page and fix anomalies there and then.

Not too complicated, I swear - I'm no technical whizz, that's for sure.

 

[SixtyMinuteMan]

Thanks, poppy cock. I think tonight I'll go though a couple of my stories that way and get them all pretty.

 

[Darkniciad]

Mine's even more convoluted *laugh*

I write in Wordperfect, but paste and do my spell/grammar check in Word.

( It's a toss-up, but I prefer Word's grammar checker, which I still only use as an alert feature, and not an authority )

BUT, I don't paste back, to avoid cross-platform burps. When I hit a change that I need to make in Word, I blink over to the original in WP and make the change there. I just scrap the one in Word when I'm done with the check.

Then after my editor gets done chewing on it, I use Find to jump to all of the italics, and insert the <i> tags. I also find/replace all the em dashes with the character code, because WPs em dashes come out as double hyphens when the story appears on Lit.

That's when it finally gets pasted into Wordpad. Then I have to go through and make sure all the line breaks are there, because if a paragraph ends and another begins on the next page of WP, it loses the line break between them during the paste.

Save as .txt, Submit.

If it's only italics you want, they're pretty easy in html. Put <i> before the word(s) you want italicised and </i> at the end.

I submit all my stories in the cut and paste box though I've always used a fairly convoluted method of getting them there. I write in Microsoft Word, then copy and paste the lot into a Notepad doc, making sure that word wrap isn't on. This has the effect of removing all formatting glytches - well, it does for me, anyway - so that when I copy and paste the Notepad doc into the cut and paste box, all is well. Then it's just a question of putting in the <i> and </i> where I want them. You don't have to use any other HTML code to get the paragraphs / line breaks in the right place.

The great thing about submitting in the cut and paste box is that you can hit 'preview' to see what it's all gonna look like on the page and fix anomalies there and then.

Not too complicated, I swear - I'm no technical whizz, that's for sure.

 

[York]

I submitted it as a .doc. I'd submit as text if I grokked how to put in italics and such, but I'm not there yet.

I actually write on OpenOffice, so the story began life as an .odf, if that matters.

I use Open Office and I must admit I find it frustrating that we can't submit in ODF, after all it's the ISO standard for word processing.

Thanks for the advice on submitting though, Dark and Poppy, I will probably try that for my next story as my last submission in RTF had a few things that really jarred when reading the published story.

 

[MMisterEE]

I want to thank all those who've helped with responses here. I re-worked the chapter in the text box last night (using the code for italics as indicated, plus figuring out how to bold the chapter headings with <b> </b>) and have re-submitted it. It looked completely fine in the preview, so if the previews here are really previews, then the awful formatting gremlins will be history.

 

[michchick98]

Thanks, poppy cock. I think tonight I'll go though a couple of my stories that way and get them all pretty.

Although I see Dark has already offered his help, I offer mine in the form of my How-To Contest entry from 2008:

Basic Text Formatting 101:
http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=364905

And although it doesn't deal with centering, the concept is the same. You need the <center> tag at the beginning of the word/sentence/paragraph you want centered and </center> at the end.

Adding the tags manually in a text file, then copying and pasting into the Story Text field is the best possible way to have your formatting appear as you want it to appear. Of course, with this option, you can preview what your story will look like before it posts.

Uploading a .doc or .rtf file with the formatting and relying on the Lit bots to format it correctly can give disastrous results when your story posts...as you've learned. And if I recall (haven't submitted a story this way in awhile) you can't preview when submitting a .doc or .rtf file.

Hope that helps.