Formatting Question

[LonelyMom]

I recently submitted a story that contained dashes. When the story appeared on the site, the dashes had been changed to double dashes. It looks awful! I wrote the story in Word and pasted it into the form on the submission page. Does anyone have any idea how I can prevent this from happening again? I have another chapter ready to send, but I'd like your advice first. Thanks for any help you can provide.

 

[Tom Collins]

Well, can't say I've ever heard of that happening. The autoformatting bot must have thought you wanted M-dashes instead of the N-dashes.

Best I can suggest would be to submit it in .doc form rather than copy/paste, and let Lit. know.

 

[Darkniciad]

A short while back, Lit made some changes to the way things are processed. For a short time, nearly anything that wasn't a number, letter, or simple punctuation was getting garbled.

For some reason, dashes didn't get changed back when everything else did.

Short of requesting that dashes be once more reinstated into the processor, there's no way to fix it. It will be changed to double dashes no matter what format you submit it in.

I'm not all that fond of it meself, but I just shrugged it off. Who knows - it may just be an oversight that would be fixed if a quick PM was whipped off to Laurel.

It's also fully retroactive, meaning that even old stories with dashes are affected.

EDIT - I take that back. I just checked and all the dashes in my old stories are now dashes again, while recent submissions are coming out with double dashes... odd...

 

[starrkers]

Mine all come out with double dashes too. It's ugly.

I know Manu's tweaking the system at the moment. Maybe now would be the time to put in a request about it?

 

[Weird Harold]

I wrote the story in Word and pasted it into the form on the submission page. Does anyone have any idea how I can prevent this from happening again?

The M-dash symbol MS Word uses doesn't translate to HTML consistently and Lit is trying to make the site more compatible with as many browsers as possible.

You can try to use an HTML code for an M-dash -- & #8212; (—)is the only reference I can find and it is given as a non-standard symbol (without the space between & and #) It works in my browser, but I have no idea wha others might recognise it.

 

[Darkniciad]

The M-dash symbol MS Word uses doesn't translate to HTML consistently and Lit is trying to make the site more compatible with as many browsers as possible.

You can try to use an HTML code for an M-dash -- & #8212; (—)is the only reference I can find and it is given as a non-standard symbol (without the space between & and #) It works in my browser, but I have no idea wha others might recognise it.

It's not just Word then, because I write in WP. Funny thing is, all my old stories that have dashes were done in Word.

My reference is coming up with & mdash; & #151; for the M-dash

http://www.webmonkey.com/reference/special_characters/

Guess I need to go through my recent stuff and edit all of it ( as if I'm not dealing with enough edits right now *grumble* ) to put in the special characters.

 

[Seattle Zack]

Em-dashes work in some of my stories, and some of them they don't. You know, Lit really should to come up with some sort of style guide in regards to these things. Like with any publisher, if you know their preferred format, it's much easier to style your submission to suit their guidelines.

 

[LonelyMom]

Thank you all for taking the time to try to help. You lost me at M dash. I was sorta hoping that someone would say "Just push the red button and it will work".

 

[cantdog]

If you can arrange to have a TEXT format, you may have fewer difficulties. Most of the time, you know, when you use a word processor, what emerges in the file you are generating is a sequence of printer codes. Right now, although not always, what Lit needs to have is a sequence of html codes.

An ordinary dash, an en-dash, the short one, is not a special character, but occurs in straight text. If you want the long one, then see above for the em-dash discussion.

Word, WP, Xy, whatever you use can, though, save the work as a text file. Italics and whatnot, em-dashes, that kind of thing can be handled with html. The html codes all use text symbols.

Alternatively, as also suggested above, you can submit the whole file and rely on Lit to convert it. They might even get it right, but you will not know whether they did or not until the story posts, and then you'll have to wait again the same length of time for your corrected version to post, if you wind up needing to correct.

Text "double quote" marks are the non-curly kind. Pasting in a regular word processor document with curly quotes can cause a problem in coding. Word processors don't actually use normal dashes, either, but instead refer to subroutines of programming to handle hyphenation; so that even dashes can cause difficulty in a wp or word document.

All the dash and quote problems can be minimized by formatting the output of your labor as plain text, with html inserted as needed for special features like italics.

Unfortunately, most word processors insert hard carriage returns at the end of their lines when they convert to text. paste those puppies in there, and you will see, in the preview, all kinds of lines of varying length. That sucks. Ideal text format will have each paragraph one long line. Then, paste it in, tweak the preview until it's right, and hit 'submit.'

 

[tanyachrs]

FYI, they don't look terrible. They look correct. I wouldn't have put the spaces around them myself, but -- is the correct text for an em-dash which is what you wanted.

 

[Darkniciad]

I copy/paste all my stuff for Lit into a text file, and save as plain text in wordpad before I submit, so plain text isn't the answer either.

(Saving as plain text from Word or WP requires going back through the txt file and fixing carriage returns at page breaks as well )

With the recent changes, it appears the only way you can get your dashes to come out the way you want them is to insert the html special character code into the document.

If you can arrange to have a TEXT format, you may have fewer difficulties. Most of the time, you know, when you use a word processor, what emerges in the file you are generating is a sequence of printer codes. Right now, although not always, what Lit needs to have is a sequence of html codes.

An ordinary dash, an en-dash, the short one, is not a special character, but occurs in straight text. If you want the long one, then see above for the em-dash discussion.

Word, WP, Xy, whatever you use can, though, save the work as a text file. Italics and whatnot, em-dashes, that kind of thing can be handled with html. The html codes all use text symbols.

Alternatively, as also suggested above, you can submit the whole file and rely on Lit to convert it. They might even get it right, but you will not know whether they did or not until the story posts, and then you'll have to wait again the same length of time for your corrected version to post, if you wind up needing to correct.

Text "double quote" marks are the non-curly kind. Pasting in a regular word processor document with curly quotes can cause a problem in coding. Word processors don't actually use normal dashes, either, but instead refer to subroutines of programming to handle hyphenation; so that even dashes can cause difficulty in a wp or word document.

All the dash and quote problems can be minimized by formatting the output of your labor as plain text, with html inserted as needed for special features like italics.

Unfortunately, most word processors insert hard carriage returns at the end of their lines when they convert to text. paste those puppies in there, and you will see, in the preview, all kinds of lines of varying length. That sucks. Ideal text format will have each paragraph one long line. Then, paste it in, tweak the preview until it's right, and hit 'submit.'

 

[cantdog]

Yeah. WP and Word put in the hard returns. I take up the text into the clipboard, paste it into NotePad. NotePad does not insert line breaks, and its only output is text. I still have to tweak the html codes, but it sure beats deleting every line break in a whole story.

 

[Weird Harold]

Thank you all for taking the time to try to help. You lost me at M dash. I was sorta hoping that someone would say "Just push the red button and it will work".

The terms em-dash and en-dash (or M-dash and N-dash) distinguish between long and short dashes. An M-dash is the width of a capial M and and N-dash is the width of a capital N.

Wordperfect and MS Word -- and almost every other "fullfeature" word processor -- use special codes to mark characters that aren't part of the ASCII standard character set. Thing like "smart quotes" (where opening and closing marks are different,) Ellipses, em-dashes, "smart hyphens" (which only display when the word is at the end of a line,) accented characters and many other "special" characters simply don't translate to plain text or HTML very well.

It's best to eliminate all of the "auto-correct" translations your word processor does to correct "--" to and M-dash; and " to left-quote or right-quote in your style selection for stories. Removing the special characters is much harder than preventing them in the first place.

cantdog

Unfortunately, most word processors insert hard carriage returns at the end of their lines when they convert to text. paste those puppies in there, and you will see, in the preview, all kinds of lines of varying length.

MS Word 97 allows three differen styles of Text file conversions -- "Plain Text" and "MSDOS Text" are both flat text formats, Only "Text with Fixed Line Length" inserts hard returns on each line.

It may be heat I have the maximum file conversion filter installed, but they are part of the stadard distribution CD, not something I had to download before installing.

 

[matriarch]

I copy/paste all my stuff for Lit into a text file, and save as plain text in wordpad before I submit, so plain text isn't the answer either.

(Saving as plain text from Word or WP requires going back through the txt file and fixing carriage returns at page breaks as well )

With the recent changes, it appears the only way you can get your dashes to come out the way you want them is to insert the html special character code into the document.

I have always saved my stories as text files before posting. In the notes box, I then ALWAYS make mention of any italics, underline, bold, dashes, stating specifically where they are, and the text to be covered by that formatting.

Seems to work.

 

[Darkniciad]

I have always saved my stories as text files before posting. In the notes box, I then ALWAYS make mention of any italics, underline, bold, dashes, stating specifically where they are, and the text to be covered by that formatting.

Seems to work.

Be quicker just to find/replace 'em with the html special character code, and let the first one run through submission. If it comes out right, the rest of them are ready to go.

Never had any problem with any other formatting ( that wasn't my own fault ) I just put in the html tags myself and make sure nothing bleeds across a page during the preview.

I have noted the occasional blockquote, things that the quick sniffers might misidentify as underage and such, and all my LST3Ks have a "lousy spelling and grammar are there on purpose" notice