Format: submitted stories always come out as blocks of text (already checked FAQ)

[WeShallUnclench]

Hi everyone, and sorry if this is the wrong place for this, but I have been reading around and checking the FAQ, and I am a bit at a loss, still.

I have now used both the submission text box and uploading a Word document, and in both cases, the resulting story is published as just line after equally spaced line of text, eating up all the original spacing and paragraphs.

How do you manage to post structured stories? It is kinda driving me nuts because it looks like everyone else is doing just fine.

How do I ensure that my spacing is preserved?

 

[Bamagan]

Hi everyone, and sorry if this is the wrong place for this, but I have been reading around and checking the FAQ, and I am a bit at a loss, still.

I have now used both the submission text box and uploading a Word document, and in both cases, the resulting story is published as just line after equally spaced line of text, eating up all the original spacing and paragraphs.

How do you manage to post structured stories? It is kinda driving me nuts because it looks like everyone else is doing just fine.

How do I ensure that my spacing is preserved?

It's hard to guess the issue without seeing the original versus what has been posted under your name. Were you aiming for longer paragraphs that got broken into single sentences? I notice you have a tendency to leave some commas outside of quotation marks, which Laurel (the one who reviews the stories) often rejects, so watch out if you ask her to take a closer look at the formatting!
You might try screenshotting a picture of the word document with the intended spacing or structure so people can try guessing at the facts, or describe in more detail the effect you were going for. Most formatting aside from things like italics and bold get stripped out when converted to the site's html, so if you were depending on codes/in-line formatting that aren't supported by whatever process they use, that could be an issue. Doesn't seem likely they'd be interpreted as paragraph breaks, but weird things can happen!

 

[Biker_Faerie]

Word can use different formatting for paragraphs and chapters than for text to make your writing look good But Lit loses all that formatting when you format. It just sees where you pressed “return”

Check if this is happening in Word and either remove that formatting or compensate for it (by adding a line between paras) when you write

Hard to be sure if this is you problem but it’s my guess

 

[WeShallUnclench]

It's hard to guess the issue without seeing the original versus what has been posted under your name. Were you aiming for longer paragraphs that got broken into single sentences? I notice you have a tendency to leave some commas outside of quotation marks, which Laurel (the one who reviews the stories) often rejects, so watch out if you ask her to take a closer look at the formatting!
You might try screenshotting a picture of the word document with the intended spacing or structure so people can try guessing at the facts, or describe in more detail the effect you were going for. Most formatting aside from things like italics and bold get stripped out when converted to the site's html, so if you were depending on codes/in-line formatting that aren't supported by whatever process they use, that could be an issue. Doesn't seem likely they'd be interpreted as paragraph breaks, but weird things can happen!

Thanks for the immediate feedback! Yeah the convention of ," rather than ", was actually new to me, I thought that was a "personal preference" thing, but I am now correcting that in my stories (the edit of my first story is still pending).

Anyway, here is a sample of how I want it to look, from the word document, and how it ends up:

 

[Bamagan]

Thanks for the immediate feedback! Yeah the convention of ," rather than ", was actually new to me, I thought that was a "personal preference" thing, but I am now correcting that in my story (the edit of my first story is still pending).

Anyway, here is a sample of how I want it to look, from the word document, and how it ends up:

View attachment 2297989

That's probably not going to fly with the way the site treats carriage returns (or hitting "enter"), which is to begin the next sentence as a new paragraph. The gaps you've left will also have been struck from the web copy as blank lines, assuming you made them by hitting enter twice. You might be able to convince her to keep your preferred formatting, but I doubt it, as she'd have to manually adjust the automated product of whatever conversion/markup software she's using, which would be extra work on her part.

The easiest thing is probably to just write your paragraphs in conventional English, i.e., just a single space between sentences instead of a line break. I don't think you'll get any result other than what's already shown doing it your original way.

 

[stickygirl]

Microsoft Word, especially the current docx format is full of unseen code. I use Word to compose but when I'm done, I copy and paste everything into a really simple text software ( TextEdit on a Mac ). I then make any necessary format changes, but even then the site's formatting can play a few tricks. I've had similar issues with the A03 site so it's not limited to Lit.

It is possible to add features such as italics and bold but you'd need to do that in the appropriate code formats. It's a while since I did that and someone may step in to correct me, but
<i>this bit in italics</i> works in the story editing side of their servers
but [these parathenses] work in the forums.
this in italics

 

[stickygirl]

Aha! I knew there was a page that addresses this problem
https://www.literotica.com/faq/publishing/publishing-text-formatting
Here you go

 

[StillStunned]

I write in Word, where I set the text formatting to "8 pts after". This creates the illusion of an extra white line between paragraphs, without me having to press "enter" twice.

When I upload the story, I copy the text from the Word doc and paste it into the Lit "story text" box. But because I only have one hard return between paragraphs, it appears as one continuous block of text. I have to go through the whole text to add an extra hard return between each of my paragraphs.

What I'm saying is that the opposite seems to have happened with your text: it seems to have added in the extra hard returns of its own accord. Weird.

 

[WeShallUnclench]

Aha! I knew there was a page that addresses this problem
https://www.literotica.com/faq/publishing/publishing-text-formatting
Here you go

Thank you - though in that specific tutorial, I couldn't really find anything for my problem.

What I will go with is what @Bamagan suggested: It's too bad I cannot go down one line within paragraphs, I feel that structure would it look more dynamic (like jumping between different ideas), but ultimately the most important part is to have the paragraphs themselves preserved.

EDIT: actually what @Biker_Faerie said might be a good work-around, but I'll have to experiment with that a bit.

Check if this is happening in Word and either remove that formatting or compensate for it (by adding a line between paras) when you write

 

[ElectricBlue]

Thank you - though in that specific tutorial, I couldn't really find anything for my problem.

What I will go with is what @Bamagan suggested: It's too bad I cannot go down one line within paragraphs, I feel that structure would it look more dynamic (like jumping between different ideas), but ultimately the most important part is to have the paragraphs themselves preserved.

EDIT: actually what @Biker_Faerie said might be a good work-around, but I'll have to experiment with that a bit.

You're typing like you would on a typewriter, with a carriage return on each line.

Type your paragraph as a single block of text, with two returns at the end of each paragraph. Copy paste that into the Lit submission text box and press Preview. That will show the text as it will appear on the site.

 

[stickygirl]

You're typing like you would on a typewriter, with a carriage return on each line.

Type your paragraph as a single block of text, with two returns at the end of each paragraph. Copy paste that into the Lit submission text box and press Preview. That will show the text as it will appear on the site.

I know you programmed your ipad to make a 'kerching' noise at the end of a line

 

[ElectricBlue]

I know you programmed your ipad to make a 'kerching' noise at the end of a line

Madame, how double dare you!! Truth be told, I've never used a typewriter. All of my uni essays were handwritten, and when I started work, we had a typing pool. My first keyboard was a work computer, in the mid eighties.

 

[stickygirl]

Madame, how double dare you!! Truth be told, I've never used a typewriter. All of my uni essays were handwritten, and when I started work, we had a typing pool. My first keyboard was a work computer, in the mid eighties.

From your saucy stories I dare say you had a paddle in the typing pool

Mid 80's - computers?!

 

[ElectricBlue]

From your saucy stories I dare say you had a paddle in the typing pool

Mid 80's - computers?!

More in Accounts, actually. Most in the typing pool were as old as my mum.

Yep, my directorate got its first computer in 1984 or 85, IIRC, with the operating system on one 8" floppy disk, the memory on another.8" floppy.

The spreadsheet was 256 rows long and an alphabet wide, and the display was orange on black, 80 characters wide. DOS 1 or 2, I reckon.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I write in Word, where I set the text formatting to "8 pts after". This creates the illusion of an extra white line between paragraphs, without me having to press "enter" twice.

When I upload the story, I copy the text from the Word doc and paste it into the Lit "story text" box. But because I only have one hard return between paragraphs, it appears as one continuous block of text. I have to go through the whole text to add an extra hard return between each of my paragraphs.

What I'm saying is that the opposite seems to have happened with your text: it seems to have added in the extra hard returns of its own accord. Weird.

You can replace single carriage returns with double by using the "Find and Replace" feature in Word.

Open the "Replace" box and enter ^p into the "Find" field. Then enter the same ^p twice in the "Replace" field and select "Replace All".

 

[StillStunned]

You can replace single carriage returns with double by using the "Find and Replace" feature in Word.

Open the "Replace" box and enter ^p into the "Find" field. Then enter the same ^p twice in the "Replace" field and select "Replace All".

Thanks! That came at just the right time. I was about to upload a new story. This works like a treat.

 

[jsmiam]

Hi everyone, and sorry if this is the wrong place for this, but I have been reading around and checking the FAQ, and I am a bit at a loss, still.

I have now used both the submission text box and uploading a Word document, and in both cases, the resulting story is published as just line after equally spaced line of text, eating up all the original spacing and paragraphs.

How do you manage to post structured stories? It is kinda driving me nuts because it looks like everyone else is doing just fine.

How do I ensure that my spacing is preserved?

Give shift-enter a try for the line-feed breaks you’re trying (if that’s what you really want to do. I tend to agree, “don’t do that,” but try shift enter if your mind is made up.

If that fails, try this: “line<br>next line” with just the <br> and no actual line break between.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

<p>This is the first sentence of my first paragraph.<br>
This is my second sentence.<br>
And finally, this is my third sentence.</p>
<p>This is the first sentence of my second paragraph.<br>
This is my second sentence.<br>
This is my third sentence.<br>
And finally, this is my fourth sentence.</p>

will look like:

This is the first sentence of my first paragraph.
This is my second sentence.
And finally, this is my third sentence.

This is the first sentence of my second paragraph.
This is my second sentence.
This is my third sentence.
And finally, this is my fourth sentence.

Without the use of the <br> at the end of each sentence, your paragraphs will look like this:

This is the first sentence of my first paragraph. This is my second sentence. And finally, this is my third sentence.

This is the first sentence of my second paragraph. This is my second sentence. This is my third sentence. And finally, this is my fourth sentence.

HTH

Edited to add that in MSWord, each time you hit the enter key, that will be interpreted as </p><p> when it is formatted for submission. So taking the original paragraph you typed into MSWord:

This is the first sentence of my first paragraph.
This is my second sentence.
And finally, this is my third sentence.

This will be formatted as:

<p>This is the first sentence of my first paragraph.</p>
<p>This is my second sentence.</p>
<p>And finally, this is my third sentence.</p>

and will look like this:

This is the first sentence of my first paragraph.

This is my second sentence.

And finally, this is my third sentence.

Putting an extra [enter] between paragraphs will be formatted as:

... end of previous line.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Start of this line ...

and the <p></p> will be stripped out of the file before publishing so doesn't do any good.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Thanks! That came at just the right time. I was about to upload a new story. This works like a treat.

I'm glad it could help you.

 

[MrPixel]

You're typing like you would on a typewriter, with a carriage return on each line.

Bingo. @WeShallUnclench , you already have the answer - you are shaping the paragraphs in your Word doc with what we call “hard returns”. That’s a text formatting no-no to begin with. If I were in my now-retired-from line of work - document conversion, for over 40 years - I would be cussing you a blue streak. Use the paragraph and line formatting functions in Word for your local viewing, and treat each paragraph as a single block of text and not a collection of lines.

How LitE shapes the paragraphs and space between lines and paragraphs is most definitely not in your control. This is the cost of web publishing. Web-based documents have to allow for screens of arbitrary size ranging from smartphones to 80” TVs. The browser is in charge of determining where to break lines in a paragraph, with a fixed amount of space between. That’s just the way it is in the HTML world.

 

[RunSilentRunDeep]

Hi there. I found this thread while puzzling about which markers (or codes) will produce which formatting results after LitE gets its hot little hands on them. Here's my puzzlement:

1. In M$ Word and other word processors, hitting "Enter" on your keyboard inserts a Paragraph marker (if you've told the software to show that stuff, it looks like this: ¶ ). These paragraphs are often automatically formatted to insert some blank horizontal space between the previous text and the new location of your cursor. (Might be a line, might be half a line, it depends)
2. If, following the instructions here (testing text formatting), you replace all those "¶" symbols with "<br>", and then copy/paste that into a plain-text editor (I use Notepad++ FWIW), you get everything in a single block (actually, in a single line on the text document). In those places where you had previously created new paragraphs, this plain-text file has "<br>".
3. If, following said instructions, you "save as" an HTML file, and then open this HTML file in your browser, you find that the "paragraphs" (text between <br>) do wrap together their own sentences into separate blocks. However you also find that the "paragraphs" have no linebreaks between them.

So that your first paragraph and its sentences look like this. And this. And this, and so on.
Then, your second paragraph and etc look like this, and this. Oh, and this. And this one too.
And your third paragraph etc look like this, and this, and so on.

Which, frankly is as much a "big block of text" to the reader's eye as the all-one-line-but-wrapped-around version. No wonder typesetters started indenting the beginnings of paragraphs, for books n such.

Now, it's obvious, even to me, that this is not how our stories are presented on the Lit web site. LitE does put a little space between our paragraphs.

This doesn't seem to have to do with <p> and </p> markers or tags. This Publishing FAQ page on text formatting does not include those markers/tags among the ones that are supported by Literotica. (It does accept "<p align="center">Center Aligned Text Here</p>", and a corresponding set of tags for right-aligned text. But these do not apply to <p> and </p), alone, do they?

So. If none of the formatting tags or markers or HTML codes or whatever -- none of the ones that address inserting ordinary white space between paragraphs -- are supported by LitE, how does that white space get there?

At this point, I'm inclined to conclude that something like this is happening:

1. LitE automatically interprets "<br>" tags as "paragraph" markers.
2. LitE has some "paragraph formatting" settings of its own, ones that we readers and authors don't need to fiddle around with.
3. One of those settings automatically uses the <br> tags the way that M$ Word uses its ¶ markers: it adds some paragraph-separating white space after each paragraph.

And so -- I think? I'm open to correction here! -- we authors can write our stories in word processors that automatically separate paragraphs with some white space. We can use the instructions in (say) this article to strip off all the extra stuff that our word processors insist on adding to our document files, and to add any supported HTML code that our little hearts desire ... and then use that to create an HTML file that should be "clean" enough for LitE to swallow without gagging on it.

If we happen to peek in (at the TXT file or the HTML file), we'll see all our paragraphs jammed up together, one after another, a big long block of words. But -- fear not! -- LitE will digest it properly, and will give us paragraphs that are cleanly separated from one another.

Is that how this dingus works? Asking for a friend ...

 

[gunhilltrain]

Madame, how double dare you!! Truth be told, I've never used a typewriter. All of my uni essays were handwritten, and when I started work, we had a typing pool. My first keyboard was a work computer, in the mid eighties.

You don't know what you've missed until you have to submit a term paper written on a typewriter. Usually the second draft has to be the final one. Have some White-out available. If all else fails, the professor will accept a couple of proofreading changes written in ink. (This was 1973-77.)

One thing that is misleading about the FAQ is that you can have links to other stories on the site, usually your own is the most common.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Is that how this dingus works? Asking for a friend ...

TLDR - two returns at the end of each paragraph will get you Lit para spacing. Two, every time you want a gap in the text.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Hi there. I found this thread while puzzling about which markers (or codes) will produce which formatting results after LitE gets its hot little hands on them. Here's my puzzlement:

1. In M$ Word and other word processors, hitting "Enter" on your keyboard inserts a Paragraph marker (if you've told the software to show that stuff, it looks like this: ¶ ). These paragraphs are often automatically formatted to insert some blank horizontal space between the previous text and the new location of your cursor. (Might be a line, might be half a line, it depends)
2. If, following the instructions here (testing text formatting), you replace all those "¶" symbols with "<br>", and then copy/paste that into a plain-text editor (I use Notepad++ FWIW), you get everything in a single block (actually, in a single line on the text document). In those places where you had previously created new paragraphs, this plain-text file has "<br>".
3. If, following said instructions, you "save as" an HTML file, and then open this HTML file in your browser, you find that the "paragraphs" (text between <br>) do wrap together their own sentences into separate blocks. However you also find that the "paragraphs" have no linebreaks between them.

So that your first paragraph and its sentences look like this. And this. And this, and so on.
Then, your second paragraph and etc look like this, and this. Oh, and this. And this one too.
And your third paragraph etc look like this, and this, and so on.

Which, frankly is as much a "big block of text" to the reader's eye as the all-one-line-but-wrapped-around version. No wonder typesetters started indenting the beginnings of paragraphs, for books n such.

Now, it's obvious, even to me, that this is not how our stories are presented on the Lit web site. LitE does put a little space between our paragraphs.

This doesn't seem to have to do with <p> and </p> markers or tags. This Publishing FAQ page on text formatting does not include those markers/tags among the ones that are supported by Literotica. (It does accept "<p align="center">Center Aligned Text Here</p>", and a corresponding set of tags for right-aligned text. But these do not apply to <p> and </p), alone, do they?

So. If none of the formatting tags or markers or HTML codes or whatever -- none of the ones that address inserting ordinary white space between paragraphs -- are supported by LitE, how does that white space get there?

At this point, I'm inclined to conclude that something like this is happening:

1. LitE automatically interprets "<br>" tags as "paragraph" markers.
2. LitE has some "paragraph formatting" settings of its own, ones that we readers and authors don't need to fiddle around with.
3. One of those settings automatically uses the <br> tags the way that M$ Word uses its ¶ markers: it adds some paragraph-separating white space after each paragraph.

And so -- I think? I'm open to correction here! -- we authors can write our stories in word processors that automatically separate paragraphs with some white space. We can use the instructions in (say) this article to strip off all the extra stuff that our word processors insist on adding to our document files, and to add any supported HTML code that our little hearts desire ... and then use that to create an HTML file that should be "clean" enough for LitE to swallow without gagging on it.

If we happen to peek in (at the TXT file or the HTML file), we'll see all our paragraphs jammed up together, one after another, a big long block of words. But -- fear not! -- LitE will digest it properly, and will give us paragraphs that are cleanly separated from one another.

Is that how this dingus works? Asking for a friend ...

Usually the <br> code is only necessary for quotes, like a few lines of a poem or song lyrics. It works best if it is written as one line line like this:

“ ‘Oh lord I’m gonna ramble ’til I get back to where I came.</br>Oh lord I’m gonna ramble ’til I get back to where I came.</br>Oh White Freightliner won’t you haul away my pain?’ ”

It will come out looking like this. (Never mind the quotes within quotes.)

" 'Oh lord I'm gonna ramble 'til I get back to where I came.
Oh lord I'm gonna ramble 'til I get back to where I came.
Oh White Freightliner won't you haul away my pain?' "

If you simply have the </br> at the end of each line, it will act as a paragraph break and add a space between each line. Not a dealbreaker, but I think it looks better the other way. Anyway, that's about the only use I can see for using </br>.

P.S.: There was a paragraph break after "pain" which makes it all into a block of text.

 

[gunhilltrain]

From your saucy stories I dare say you had a paddle in the typing pool

Mid 80's - computers?!

Bad bosses get the paddle too. And with the entire typing pool (or accounts), that could be fifteen to one. Ouch!