Issue with HTML

[lovecraft68]

Okay maybe someone can help me here because I'm getting seriously frustrated.

My contest entry has a lot of italics so a lot of tedious HTML so I go through this 25k thing three times and have the wife do it once to make sure all the starts and stops are in place.

I've spent the last hour fucking with this thing and am starting to wonder if there is an issue with lit.

I have several sections that should be in regular text and all still in all italics yet the HTML is right here is an example

<i>“I would tell my mom how much I love her and would love to make love to her and hold her tight.”</i>

When I first started typing I thought I was just playing along. If her game included me saying: Mom I love you so much and being sweet I could do that. But as I thought about it, it occurred to me I meant it. I did want to love my mom in every way like Debra had said about her son. To be her love, not just a taboo fuck buddy.

<i>“I would want it to be more than fucking my mom.”</i> I went on, <i>“I would want to be good to you too!”</i>

From When to buddy should be in regular text, but its showing in italics and if you look I stop at the word tight and start again at "I would"

So what gives here? Again I have several sections like this and its all looks fine. There's nothing I can do here that I know of except for let the story be formatted like absolute confusing shit or don't bother at all.

 

[Trip_Dalton]

I copied and pasted exactly what you posted, into a submission box, and it worked perfect.

My suggestion is copy your story from the submission box, delete the story, and start over, using your edited copy.

 

[Over_Red]

Looks good from what I can see.

Try this: use the Find function. Count every instance of "<i>" and every instance of "</i>". They should equal one another; if not, an unclosed tag may be screwing you up somewhere, creating an inversion of formatting.

On a related note, I forgot to close an italics tag at the end of one of my stories. Interestingly, the entire bottom of the web page, including the comments and the related stories box, is now in italics.

 

[lovecraft68]

I copied and pasted exactly what you posted, into a submission box, and it worked perfect.

My suggestion is copy your story from the submission box, delete the story, and start over, using your edited copy.

I tried that, I got rid of what I had pasted in the submission box, then went back to the original doc and tried again

A lot of the other italics are fine, but there's three sections like this that are fine that aren't working right and one page long stretch where everything is in italics despite there being a lot of starts/stops

Tomorrow is another day.

 

[RejectReality]

My best guess is that there's some sort of special character insertion going on, messing up the tags.

In this specific example, after pasting, try backspacing and retyping the </i> tag directly into the submission window, then preview and see if it comes out right.

If it works, then do the same at every occurrence of the end italic tag where there's a problem. You'll also want to look through the settings of your word processor to see if there's some sort of automatic replacement you need to turn off.

 

[Hypoxia]

I write on a WinDoze machine with Jarte, more a super-duper text editor than word processor (although it handles DOC, DOCX, RTF as well as TXT). Jarte inserts no crud. What I see in the editor is exactly what gets pasted into the submissions window, HTML tags and all, and I have the instant LIT preview to check for fuckups.

 

[Ardent1]

My suggestion would be to use a text search string. Searching i> will turn up every tag one at a time whether it's i> or /i> To through and make sure every italic <i> has a closing </i> I think you've missed one closing /i> somewhere. They're always somewhere prior to the section that isn't closing properly.

 

[Bramblethorn]

My suggestion would be to use a text search string. Searching i> will turn up every tag one at a time whether it's i> or /i> To through and make sure every italic <i> has a closing </i> I think you've missed one closing /i> somewhere. They're always somewhere prior to the section that isn't closing properly.

Yeah, I've fallen into that trap a few times.

One way to test whether this is the cause: paste only the affected section in, and hit the preview. If it still looks wrong, then you know the problem is somewhere within that section. But if the problem only shows up when you include the previous material, then that suggests an unclosed tag earlier on.

Also, if you're not already working in a plain text editor (e.g. Notepad), try pasting the story into one and then copying it back. This can sometimes help eliminate invisible formatting characters etc that might cause problems.

 

[Beatnic_jazzman]

Page breaks

I read somewhere that if the tags span a (Lit) page break then that screws them up, might be worth checking.

 

[karaline]

I spent an awful lot of time dicking around with italics and html on the submission page of Lit a few months ago. Another writer and mac user was having issues with a loss formatting on her piece, so she emailed it to me and I logged into her account and posted it. I can categorically say that sometimes the html code works on a section of text you paste into that box but sometimes it just doesn't. I know this because on a few occasions I repasted in the same section of text twice and some times the italics appeared and sometimes they didn't.

I can only only suggest what others are, keep trying, keep checking it over in the preview, keep fixing it and trying again and if you can't spot the error, try just repasting as it is, that worked for me. Its tedious and frustrating and I don't envy you.

Best of Luck

 

[lovecraft68]

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions.

Turns out there were two instances where I had the slash dehind the eye rather than in front.

What was odd is neither of them were anywhere near the affected areas but when I fixed them it caused everything to fall into place. Strange but I'll take it.

I was up until one am with this but the story is already up so I guess its worth it

Thanks again.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I could say ... "Pilot Error!" but then he might think I mean him.

 

[robertreams]

Why not merely dump the italics? Why do you need them, seems like simple dialog to me? I have the same issue on e-publishing, so I merely avoid italics. I have a story with a lot of flashbacks. I had them in italics but now have formatted a special page to indent that text as one does with extended quotes.