can i submit formatting through copy & paste?

[silverwhisper]

dumb question about the process whereby a story actually gets posted: my first story was posted and there are some formatting things i'd like to include next time. this time, i submitted in RTF rather than copy & paste, mainly b/c i thought i'd have better luck getting the formatting i wanted this way. unfortunately, it isn't coming out the way i would have ideally preferred.

so i guess my question: if submitting through copy & paste, should i use VB or HTML tags to get the desired formatting? or does that just not work out at all?

ed

 

[Colleen Thomas]

dumb question about the process whereby a story actually gets posted: my first story was posted and there are some formatting things i'd like to include next time. this time, i submitted in RTF rather than copy & paste, mainly b/c i thought i'd have better luck getting the formatting i wanted this way. unfortunately, it isn't coming out the way i would have ideally preferred.

so i guess my question: if submitting through copy & paste, should i use VB or HTML tags to get the desired formatting? or does that just not work out at all?

ed

I'm computer blonde, but when I wrote i do centers like this

<center>***</center>

and it takes them.

Hope that helps.

 

[silverwhisper]

thanks, colly! FYI, that would be HTML.

much obliged!

ed

 

[Weird Harold]

so i guess my question: if submitting through copy & paste, should i use VB or HTML tags to get the desired formatting? or does that just not work out at all?

It depends on what the formatting problems are.

You can use some HTML tags to mange things like italics, bold, centering, blockquotes, and the like, but Lit will strip out font changes tables, links and most other HTML.

If you do include HTML tags in in your story, put a note in the coments field that they are there because the formatting scripts will automatically strip all but a few HTML tags from a story if you don't. (they used to automaticaly strip all HTML from stories unless it was approved.)

Other formatting problems, like lost paragraph indents and random paragraph breaks in the middle of a sentence are caused by "non-printing" or "Invisible" characters and HTML ignoring "White space" like leading spaces for an indent.

Check out my How To Essay for some of the potential problems with formatting and a way to check your story before posting:
http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=57781

 

[silverwhisper]

harold: thanks! it was specifically italicized text that i was finding problematic, which is pretty funny considering it's the first thing you mentioned.

many thanks!

ed

 

[Weird Harold]

harold: thanks! it was specifically italicized text that i was finding problematic, which is pretty funny considering it's the first thing you mentioned.

Italics is the one formatting tag that is most required for proper punctuation, so it's usually the formatting that people have questions about.

"Extra" paragraph breaks are the formatting problem that is actually the most common, but most people dont know how to describe it so it goes unrecognised.

 

[maggot420]

It's amazing to me that Weird Harold always answers my questions before I even realize I have them

 

[Stella_Omega]

I submitted a story with all its html tags in it- only paragraph breaks and italics. To make it work, I have to remove ALL returns, so that my text looked like a single paragraph of gabble. It hasn't been accepted yet... jeeze, what have I DONE!

 

[Alex De Kok]

You might want to look at my 'How-To', too. It's called Bold or Italic? and that's pretty much what it's about, except that it covers the submission process via the 'cut-and-paste' option, too.

Alex