Newline/Whitespace Formatting Question

[anopheles_leet]

I'm trying to figure out how best to format my work for submission. As per this guide I'm pretty comfortable using html tags for basic formatting (bold, italics, etc.) but I was wondering whether it was acceptable to use them to specify newline formatting.

In my word processor, I have the old fashioned habit of putting in a double carriage return to define paragraph breaks, and using a single carriage return for a new line within a paragraph (most commonly used to indicate a change in speaker in dialogue).

I can see by looking at how stories on the site are formatted that this is generally stripped out for publication, so that any carriage return in the raw text becomes a new paragraph - I assume rendered as a <p> tag in html - with any excess whitespace (i.e. my double returns) being removed in favour of automatic paragraph spacing. Which is great, but it means those in-paragraph line breaks all now become full paragraph breaks.

I can just about live with that for the most part, with one huge exception - I often like to make dramatic cuts to a new scene by starting with a new line of dialogue. If each line of dialogue is rendered as it's own paragraph, that makes these scene shifts completely incomprehensible. For example:

I stood, completely alone in the sparsely decorated concrete room, which was completely devoid of any seating. Wondering how I had become trapped in this obvious narrative framing device, I contemplated a conversation I'd had a few days earlier.

"Are you comfortable on that leather couch?" asked the mysterious woman who had definitely not been there in the previous scene.
I nodded. The couch that I was sitting in was very comfortable, and complemented the room's lavish wallpaper. It occurred to me that this change in furnishing would be very confusing if there wasn't a clear paragraph break to indicate where my reverie had begun.

Since I noticed basic html tags can be used to specify formatting, I wondered if it was okay to use the linebreak tags <br> to manually specify the non-paragraph newlines? Or is this going to completely confuse the formatting and upset/annoy the moderators when reviewing my work? Is there anything else I can do to make it clear how I want the formatting to be (e.g. strip out those pesky double carriage returns before submitting)?

Also, is the standard html <br> fine, or should I go with the xhtml friendly <br />?

Another possibility - although I find it kind of ugly - is that there is a horizontal rule tag <hr> which could be used to indicate a change in scene. Is this tag supported for literotica formatting? Technically allowed but a bad frowned upon because it is very ugly?

Thanks in advance

 

[NotWise]

I'm trying to figure out how best to format my work for submission. As per this guide I'm pretty comfortable using html tags for basic formatting (bold, italics, etc.) but I was wondering whether it was acceptable to use them to specify newline formatting.

In my word processor, I have the old fashioned habit of putting in a double carriage return to define paragraph breaks, and using a single carriage return for a new line within a paragraph (most commonly used to indicate a change in speaker in dialogue).

I can see by looking at how stories on the site are formatted that this is generally stripped out for publication, so that any carriage return in the raw text becomes a new paragraph - I assume rendered as a <p> tag in html - with any excess whitespace (i.e. my double returns) being removed in favour of automatic paragraph spacing. Which is great, but it means those in-paragraph line breaks all now become full paragraph breaks.

I can just about live with that for the most part, with one huge exception - I often like to make dramatic cuts to a new scene by starting with a new line of dialogue. If each line of dialogue is rendered as it's own paragraph, that makes these scene shifts completely incomprehensible. For example:



Since I noticed basic html tags can be used to specify formatting, I wondered if it was okay to use the linebreak tags <br> to manually specify the non-paragraph newlines? Or is this going to completely confuse the formatting and upset/annoy the moderators when reviewing my work? Is there anything else I can do to make it clear how I want the formatting to be (e.g. strip out those pesky double carriage returns before submitting)?

Also, is the standard html <br> fine, or should I go with the xhtml friendly <br />?

Another possibility - although I find it kind of ugly - is that there is a horizontal rule tag <hr> which could be used to indicate a change in scene. Is this tag supported for literotica formatting? Technically allowed but a bad frowned upon because it is very ugly?

Thanks in advance

The article you cited lists the html codes for bold, underline and italics. You can use html code for some special characters -- &mdash, for instance. I think you can also use centering, but don't quote me on that. Other html tags such as <br>, <hr>, or <p> should be stripped out by the site. If you counted on them for your formatting, then they will be lost and your formatting will be a mess.

Normal formatting for stories submitted to Lit uses two newlines (or carriage returns) between each paragraph, and nothing more. In particular, no newlines within paragraphs. I don't know how the site would handle that, but I doubt it would be what you want.

People usually use a series of characters on a line by themselves with blank lines before and after to indicate a scene break. For instance, I use

* * *

Other people use other sequences.

If you want dialog to start a new line, then you will need to precede it with two newlines so that it appears at the beginning of a paragraph.

With the exceptions noted above, the site controls the typography. The story you submit shouldn't depend on your wordprocessor or on html tags to provide typography.

 

[anopheles_leet]

Okay, thanks. That's kind of frustrating, but I guess I'll just have to get used to it.

Is there an official list anywhere of the tags and entities that are okay to use?

Alternatively, is there a sandbox somewhere to preview what things will come out looking like? Or does it depend on some choices the mods make?

 

[NotWise]

You should probably start a thread in the Author's Hangout to introduce yourself and ask your questions. There are people there who can answer you more authoritatively than I can.

The article you cited gave examples of how the bold, underline and italic tags work. There's an example of centered text at the beginning of my story Pixie by the Fireside. Briefly, it uses <blockquote><center>text to center</blockquote></center>.

You can pick up just about any story on Lit to see what the formatting looks like. Lit uses a simple, readable, and uniform format. When you submit a story, you can preview it to see how it will look. The preview works fairly well, but not perfectly.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Okay, thanks. That's kind of frustrating, but I guess I'll just have to get used to it.

Is there an official list anywhere of the tags and entities that are okay to use?

Alternatively, is there a sandbox somewhere to preview what things will come out looking like? Or does it depend on some choices the mods make?

Copy and paste your content into the submission form text box and Preview. That will show exactly how your copy will look when published.

My advice, after 100 plus stories/chapters, is to load stories using the text box (you can edit the copy), and forget about .docx .rtf .txt etc. WYSIWYG.

Keep html down to a minimum, because when it goes wrong, it can go spectacularly wrong (eg, the entire second page of a story turned to italics, because the </i> couldn't predict a Lit page break.

And, FYI, a Lit page is about 3750 words plus or minus 50 or so (it's in fact determined by a data base bin size).

 

[RejectReality]

Copy and paste your content into the submission form text box and Preview. That will show exactly how your copy will look when published.

My advice, after 100 plus stories/chapters, is to load stories using the text box (you can edit the copy), and forget about .docx .rtf .txt etc. WYSIWYG.

Keep html down to a minimum, because when it goes wrong, it can go spectacularly wrong (eg, the entire second page of a story turned to italics, because the </i> couldn't predict a Lit page break.

And, FYI, a Lit page is about 3750 words plus or minus 50 or so (it's in fact determined by a data base bin size).

Not any more. Any time there's a paragraph break, the text processor cuts off the italics. So if you have multi-paragraph italics ( such as author's notes ) you have to tag every paragraph. Noticed that a while back in my author's notes, and keep forgetting about it.

( Look at anything recent of mine to see it in the end notes )

 

[ElectricBlue]

Not any more. Any time there's a paragraph break, the text processor cuts off the italics. So if you have multi-paragraph italics ( such as author's notes ) you have to tag every paragraph. Noticed that a while back in my author's notes, and keep forgetting about it.

( Look at anything recent of mine to see it in the end notes )

Noted. Ta.

That's when I stopped being clever with html. Atter that page roll over problem - which was one of the very few times I've submitted an edit to fix a glitch - I became a fan of "words tell a story, not pretty formatting." I might use bold for internal chapter headings and the occasional italics, but I find html too much of a hassle nowadays.