Italics

[HandsInTheDark]

I submit stories as rtf files because it's easy and they can represent all the formatting I ever use in stories. It makes italics and boldface easy and I'm a huge fan of easy.

Routinely, they get mangled when the get posted. Once all the spaces around italicized words got deleted, sothishappened. More recently italics got stuck on for the entire bottom half of a page. That's clearly not something I did in rtf. Whoever is converting the files to webpage format is doing it by hand and not checking results.

Have other folk seen this? Do you get around it by submitting in other formats? I'm not a fan of hand typing square brackets or angle brackets for format specifiers.

 

[sr71plt]

I have always cut and pasted into the submissions box and have manually marked italics myself. Since publishing doesn't use italics all that much, it's never been a burden. You might look at how often you use italics and whether it's really a problem to manually mark them yourself--it could be that you're overusing them.

 

[RejectReality]

Inserting the HTML tags yourself and submitting via uploading a .txt file or copy-paste is the only way to be sure, because you can preview before you submit, and correct any mistakes you made.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

I have always cut and pasted into the submissions box and have manually marked italics myself. Since publishing doesn't use italics all that much, it's never been a burden. You might look at how often you use italics and whether it's really a problem to manually mark them yourself--it could be that you're overusing them.

I write a number of females in the 19-24 range, with a realistic voice. They tend to get dramatic. Italics are a hazard of the style.

I guess I could write a tool to translate .rtf files to whatever lit wants. Is it angle bracket I or square bracket I?

 

[sr71plt]

I write a number of females in the 19-24 range, with a realistic voice. They tend to get dramatic. Italics are a hazard of the style.

I guess I could write a tool to translate .rtf files to whatever lit wants. Is it angle bracket I or square bracket I?

Then you are probably overusing italics (and irritating your readers). Writing doesn't render everything realistically. If it did, all you'd have to anyone's dialogue is gobblygook, repetition, and incomplete sentences.

 

[NotWise]

Is it angle bracket I or square bracket I?

Angle. Square brackets are for BBCode and angle brackets are for HTML.

 

[sr71plt]

Angle in the story file; bracket here on the forum.

 

[PennLady]

I write a number of females in the 19-24 range, with a realistic voice. They tend to get dramatic. Italics are a hazard of the style.

I guess I could write a tool to translate .rtf files to whatever lit wants. Is it angle bracket I or square bracket I?

When I started, I would search for the italics in my story, then enter the tags which should be <i> and </i>. That got annoying, so I started inserting them as I went along. I would open the tags, then type the text in italics, then close the tag.

This was because I submitted to a few sites and some took the tags and some didn't. This made it easy to search and remove the tags and save the file under a different name so that I knew what to submit where.

As for the 19-24yo females -- I used to be one, albeit probably not a typical one. I don't think I vocally italicized a lot (to coin a phrase). For the record, I've read many stories about women this age, and italics aren't necessary to convey their voice. Too much in italics really does get annoying. I'd advise emphasizing a few choice words here and there, and then letting the characterizations do the rest of the work for you.

 

[Weird Harold]

I submit stories as rtf files because it's easy and they can represent all the formatting I ever use in stories. It makes italics and boldface easy and I'm a huge fan of easy.

You need to clean up the RTF files to eliminate the "tracked changes" (or 'undo' information) so that the scripts that convert RTF to HTML don't get so confused.

Saving into a different format and re-saving as RTF usually strips out the extraneous format changes. Saving as HTML and opening as a text file will set all of the HTML tags for Italics but will also require stripping out the HTML header and footer formatting -- depending on your WP program, you may also need to do a global find and replace of <p>&</p> tags with doubled paragraph breaks

In the long run, it is simply less work to manually place the <i></i> tags yourself if you can't clean up the RTF files.

ETA:

\par Modern day -- }{\rtlch\fcs1 \af0 \ltrch\fcs0 \i\insrsid9526425\charrsid3954357 descend}{\rtlch\fcs1 \af0 \ltrch\fcs0 \i\insrsid526250 e}{\rtlch\fcs1 \af0 \ltrch\fcs0 \i\insrsid9526425\charrsid3954357 nt }{\rtlch\fcs1 \af0 \ltrch\fcs0 \insrsid9526425
of Robin of Locksley saddled with his ancester\rquote s famous alias?

The red is an example of the kind of extra RTF coding you get by changing one letter of a single word. Accumulate enough of that kind of garbage and Lit's formatting scripts lose track of things.

\par Historical -- English yeomanry rescuing damsels?

An example of a clean RTF paragraph.

\par Historical -- }{\rtlch\fcs1 \af0 \ltrch\fcs0 \i\insrsid9526425\charrsid15481863 English}{\rtlch\fcs1 \af0 \ltrch\fcs0 \insrsid9526425 yeomanry rescuing damsels?

The same paragraph with RTF code for Italics in green.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

Then you are probably overusing italics (and irritating your readers). Writing doesn't render everything realistically. If it did, all you'd have to anyone's dialogue is gobblygook, repetition, and incomplete sentences.

I'm pretty content with my use of italics, thanks. I get red H's on just about everything I write, and while I've gotten occasional comments saying I write females so convincingly some female readers assumed I was one, no one has ever once commented I was overusing emphasis.

I don't know what literary critics would say but my target audience is happy; everyone else can go hang.