Story Submission Formats

[DimensionOfDesire]

When I tried to submit my first story, it said I could either attach a file or paste in the plain text into the provided text area (but no both of course. I write in Word, but when attaching a word (.docx) file it said that readers might have to convert the file to read it. Is the only format that is readable using a browser plain text? A second follow-up question: If a writer submits a story in HTML, will that display for readers and if so, will saving the document to HTML from Word be acceptable HTML to submit?

Thanks in advance.

 

[tnhardon]

When I tried to submit my first story, it said I could either attach a file or paste in the plain text into the provided text area (but no both of course. I write in Word, but when attaching a word (.docx) file it said that readers might have to convert the file to read it. Is the only format that is readable using a browser plain text? A second follow-up question: If a writer submits a story in HTML, will that display for readers and if so, will saving the document to HTML from Word be acceptable HTML to submit?

Thanks in advance.

My suggestion is if you write in Word then just submit the Word document. I used to write the stories in my email and then copy and paste them as plain text but ran into some issues with getting it to format the way I wanted. It may take an extra day to get processed, but I have done my last half dozen chapters in Word and have had no issues.

I've never tried writing it in HTML as that seems overly complicated given the other options. I don't know if the admins will convert it or not. Like I said, I'd just submit your .docx file.

 

[Weird Harold]

When I tried to submit my first story, it said I could either attach a file or paste in the plain text into the provided text area (but no both of course. I write in Word, but when attaching a word (.docx) file it said that readers might have to convert the file to read it. Is the only format that is readable using a browser plain text?

Lit uses a script based conversion process to add new stories to the story database. The conversion script can read .TXT, .RTF (although it has problems with heavily edited .RTF files,) and MSWord 97 .DOC files. It cannot handle later Word . DOCX files directly. It is better (i.e. faster) if you save your work as .DOC or .RTF files and verify the changes before submitting than waiting for Lit to manually convert to a format compatible with their scripts.

A second follow-up question: If a writer submits a story in HTML, will that display for readers and if so, will saving the document to HTML from Word be acceptable HTML to submit?

Lit cannot accept .HTM or .HTML files. They will accept some HTML tags in a C&P or .TXT file but severely limit the available tags. Italics, Bold, Underline, Blockquote, and Center are the permissible HTML formatting. It is possible to use "Word's save as HTML" feature to add the permissible tags, but the resulting HTML file has to be edited as a text file to remove impermissible HTML tags for submission via C&P or .TXT upload.


Literotica has an established "look and feel" to the way stories are formatted. Any font, font size, color, or other formatting you have in your submission will be stripped out to maintain a consistent look and feel to Literotica. Literotica will not recognize any formatting in your Word Processor such as margins, indented paragraphs or white space between paragraphs; it expects a blank paragraph between paragraphs to provide white space.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Lit uses a script based conversion process to add new stories to the story database. The conversion script can read .TXT, .RTF (although it has problems with heavily edited .RTF files,) and MSWord 97 .DOC files. It cannot handle later Word . DOCX files directly. It is better (i.e. faster) if you save your work as .DOC or .RTF files and verify the changes before submitting than waiting for Lit to manually convert to a format compatible with their scripts.



Lit cannot accept .HTM or .HTML files. They will accept some HTML tags in a C&P or .TXT file but severely limit the available tags. Italics, Bold, Underline, Blockquote, and Center are the permissible HTML formatting. It is possible to use "Word's save as HTML" feature to add the permissible tags, but the resulting HTML file has to be edited as a text file to remove impermissible HTML tags for submission via C&P or .TXT upload.


Literotica has an established "look and feel" to the way stories are formatted. Any font, font size, color, or other formatting you have in your submission will be stripped out to maintain a consistent look and feel to Literotica. Literotica will not recognize any formatting in your Word Processor such as margins, indented paragraphs or white space between paragraphs; it expects a blank paragraph between paragraphs to provide white space.

The submission form now says it can handle...

If you choose to upload your story, it should be uploaded as a plain text file with a file name ending in ".txt" if possible. If your story has bold or italics and you need to upload a Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), OpenDocument (.odt) or a Rich Text (.rtf) file, you can do so, but you cannot preview it online and it may take slightly longer to be posted because we must process .doc and .rtf files manually. If you have questions or concerns, please contact us and we'll be happy to help.

 

[Weird Harold]

The submission form now says it can handle...

Lit has always had the capacity to convert almost any word-processor format, but only TXT, DOC, and RTF could be processed automatically by the scripts.

That may have changed, but I still see complaints about the lag in processing DOCX and occasional complaints about errors with RTF files.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Lit has always had the capacity to convert almost any word-processor format, but only TXT, DOC, and RTF could be processed automatically by the scripts.

That may have changed, but I still see complaints about the lag in processing DOCX and occasional complaints about errors with RTF files.

And Laurel has said on many occasions that there are no script that process stories, she does everything herself.

 

[Hypoxia]

In case anyone cares, I write with the free multi-tab JARTE editor (I love its bundled thesaurus/dictionary WordWeb) in plain text with HTML tags. (*) I load the almost-finished piece in MS Word 2002 SP (my latest version, ha ha) for grammar-and spell-check only.

I may save the piece in RTF or DOC but I never submit those. Instead, I cut-n-paste into the submission window. I scan through that window looking for what my browser thinks are misspellings. The I hit the Preview button. What shows is pretty close to how LIT will finally render it. I look for format and final critical problems, fix those, and THEN submit the booger. This lessens the heartache.

(*) HTML in LIT texts:

<b></b> for bold, <i></i> for italics, <u></u> for underline
<center></center>, <blockquote></blockquote> for indent
<br> for line feed -- leave a note to Laurel
  for non-breaking space
&emdash; for long dash

I think that's about all.

 

[portmann2222]

I write in Word, not even sure what edition but newer than 97. Must I go back and manually encode every italic in my story?

 

[Wonderer67]

I write in Word, not even sure what edition but newer than 97. Must I go back and manually encode every italic in my story?

No. You should be able to format it as you’d like, and simply upload the document.

I submitted my first story in text format and added in the html tags. Never again.

I’d highly recommend just uploading a word doc. I don’t know, which version of word you need, but give it a shot.

 

[portmann2222]

No. You should be able to format it as you’d like, and simply upload the document.

I submitted my first story in text format and added in the html tags. Never again.

I’d highly recommend just uploading a word doc. I don’t know, which version of word you need, but give it a shot.

Thanks for the info. It's a 200 page story so I was seriously reconsidering. Italics are about the only formatting in the thing, but there's a lot of it.

 

[Trubbycat]

Um. I write in Adobe InDesign because I am weird that way. Any tips?