Two questions about submitting stories by pasting them in.

[tomlitilia]

There are two ways to submit stories to literotica. Either you copy-paste it in the submission window, or you upload a document. I have two questions related to the former.
1. How can I avoid long dashes turning into two short dashes?

2. Is there a way to make some content italic? I use italics to indicate e.g. content of emails or sms, and I don't want to use quotation marks to avoid confusion with spoken conversation.

 

[NaokoSmith]

There are two ways to submit stories to literotica. Either you copy-paste it in the submission window, or you upload a document. I have two questions related to the former.
1. How can I avoid long dashes turning into two short dashes?

2. Is there a way to make some content italic? I use italics to indicate e.g. content of emails or sms, and I don't want to use quotation marks to avoid confusion with spoken conversation.

The 'em dash' or long hyphen is created in your word document automatically when you type a dash in between two words. Then Literotica recognises it as an 'em dash' not a dash and converts it into two dashes. I think you could get round this by forcing your word document to have dashes instead of em dashes. For example, if you type your words, then go back and insert the dash afterwards it stays as a short dash in my word programme, instead of turning itself into an em dash automatically.

You can use HTML tags for a number of things including:

• italics <i> TYPE YOUR ITALIC WORD HERE </i>
• bold <b> TYPE YOUR EMBOLDENED WORD HERE </b>

Make sure you put in the end HTML tag as well as the beginning one, otherwise all your text is turned into italics/bold.


You'll be able to check if this works, when you press 'preview' and the story pops up, you can see the text in italics if you have correctly used the HTML tags.

 

[RejectReality]

For the em dash, you can do what I do, if the ones produced by your text editor of choice are coming out as the double dashes, once processed by Lit.

Do a find/replace in the document, and replace all the em dashes with the html special character code, which is:

—

All seven characters are required. You should see the em dash appear when you preview the document before submitting.

 

[sr71plt]

You got the answer on italics, which pretty much is the only coding you need for the Lit. format style. There's a standard format here, just like any anthology does, to make the read coherent for the reader--something the author would want, if they thought about it.

On the em dash issue, first, I'm not sure why you aren't getting em dashes in the Lit. version when you've provided em dashes in the Word version you've cut and pasted into the text box. That's what I get--em dashes. But if I had a program that wouldn't translate em dashes to the Lit. submissions box and rendered them as two hyphens, I wouldn't bother to hyperventilate over that. The double hyphens are standard on some Web sites, and I'd just cooperate with that standardization. The readers understand what it means. Must not be a standardization on Lit., thought, as I get regular em dashes when I provide them. (And then when I submit the story to another site, I have to translate back to double hyphens because that's what that site uses).