BabySofia Posted August 20, 2020 Share Posted August 20, 2020 So I've noticed a lot of formatting issues the past couple of months that I guess are beginning to drive me a bit crazy with my OCD! I hope you'll indulge me in a few suggestions to get formatting to work right on posts here! 1) Setting up your document: If you are writing in Word, Google Docs, or most other word processing software you do not need to put an extra return carriage before, or after, every paragraph. Instead go up to your 'Format' option in Word or Line Spacing/Custom Spacing in Google Docs. Here I like to set everything in single spacing, or 1.5 if you feel the need for more spacing. The important thing here though is the 'after paragraph' spacing. If you'll set it to 6pt, it'll work better when you paste it over here. It all comes back to the way HTML is translated and setup on a space like this. It will automatically give you that extra spacing when it reads a paragraph character. So if you end up adding a return carriage for an empty space, plus a carriage for the new paragraph. It looks like this. With this big gigantic void of space between to interrupt your reader scrolling down. When you're talking single line replies in conversation it's really hard on the eyes to follow. You can fix it by manually removing the carriages, but it's not a pleasant experience! 2) Pasting your document: So I'm not sure if this is Mac specific, or if it's a Microsoft word problem. If I paste directly from Word into here I end up with an image instead of the text. It's a weird quirk that meant I played around with a few things. I tried going directly from Google Docs. That doesn't go as a picture, but instead ends up with bold emphasis setup on the pasted text. (Getting rid of the formatting is no easy task....) What I've found works really well though is to paste the chapter I'm working on into Google docs, and then downloading that as an .rtf file and opening it in a simpler word processing application. It then pastes perfectly into here and usually the only correction I have to make to formatting, is increasing the size of my chapter name. 3) Separating Scenes or Chapters This came up on another post this week. When you have a change of scene, change of perspective, or other massive shift in a posting do something to help us as readers understand that. Sometimes the scene shift doesn't qualify for a separate chapter. When that's the case my personal preference is to capitalize the first three words and bold them. SOME OF MY favorite authors have done that or similar and it helps break things apart. The use of ****************** or +++++++++++++ between sections can also help. Try to avoid having one long block of text though. I may add some other things later on, but if you consider these points as you post your works it really does make it more enjoyable for the reader! Sincerely, Someone Who Reads/Writes a Lot Link to comment
Shinxcess Posted August 20, 2020 Share Posted August 20, 2020 Thank you for this!! Personally I used Microsoft Word, but I’ll definitely check back in on this post when I end up dropping my first story 1 Link to comment
Dr_J Posted August 20, 2020 Share Posted August 20, 2020 My biggest challenge pasting here is my Word Docs always look fine with spacing, but they show up as double-spaced here. It's not a huge pain, but it is a bit of a chore with longer chapters when I need to fix the spacing issues! Haha. Link to comment
BabySofia Posted August 21, 2020 Author Share Posted August 21, 2020 3 hours ago, Dr_J said: My biggest challenge pasting here is my Word Docs always look fine with spacing, but they show up as double-spaced here. It's not a huge pain, but it is a bit of a chore with longer chapters when I need to fix the spacing issues! Haha. That's where that paragraph spacing when you set it up that I mentioned above will save you work. You're manually putting the extra space with extra return carriages, if you use the paragraph spacing feature to make it happen you'll be a lot better off and not have that problem. 1 Link to comment
Dr_J Posted August 21, 2020 Share Posted August 21, 2020 8 hours ago, BabySofia said: That's where that paragraph spacing when you set it up that I mentioned above will save you work. You're manually putting the extra space with extra return carriages, if you use the paragraph spacing feature to make it happen you'll be a lot better off and not have that problem. This will definitely come in handy! Thank you so much!! Link to comment
BoTox Posted August 21, 2020 Share Posted August 21, 2020 One of the easiest ways to get the formatting is to strip out everything your word processor adds and paste in clean text. I do this by copying in my text to Notepad (I actually use Notepad ++) and the copy it out of Notepad to be put in the DD page. 2 Link to comment
BabySofia Posted August 21, 2020 Author Share Posted August 21, 2020 2 hours ago, BoTox said: One of the easiest ways to get the formatting is to strip out everything your word processor adds and paste in clean text. I do this by copying in my text to Notepad (I actually use Notepad ++) and the copy it out of Notepad to be put in the DD page. Definitely works well too! Link to comment
crono Posted August 23, 2020 Share Posted August 23, 2020 On 8/21/2020 at 3:25 PM, BabySofia said: Definitely works well too! Going to try this tonight! Link to comment
BabySofia Posted August 23, 2020 Author Share Posted August 23, 2020 1 hour ago, crono said: Going to try this tonight! Link to comment
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