Story submission formatting

[RagnarHairyBreeches]

I’ve only submitted three stories. So, I’m relatively new here.

I use Libre Office as a word processor. In Libre Office, when I start a new paragraph, a blank line appears between paragraphs. I didn’t set it up that way. That’s the default.

So, I copied the text into the form for submitting to Lit and the same space that was between paragraphs in the word processor was also present in the submission form. Good! That’s what I expected.

With my second submission, it was exactly the same. Well, what else?

However, with my third submission a few days ago the blank line between paragraphs (that was present in Libre Office) was no longer in the submission form. Bugger! I don’t recall changing any setup in the word processor, so I was wondering if anything has happened to the submission form. And was wondering if anyone else has experienced the same thing.

Tedious, fixing it, but not a big deal. I read the draft through a few times in Lit’s submission form in draft mode, and entered carriage returns where appropriate, but as I said, tedious. I’d rather not have to be doing this every time. What's your experience?

 

[TheWritingGroup]

I also use LO, and my experience has also been inconsistent.

Finally, I turned off LO's automatic paragraphs and press Enter twice for each new one. It's less annoying than having to reformat the entire story when I submit it.

--Annie

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

I've got a tool that might help. I created it for my own stories, but use it if you see fit.

https://waxphilosophic.sdf.org/LitMark/

1. Write the story in LibreOffice
2. Do an export as HTML
3. Drag and drop the HTML file onto the textbox of the formatting tool.
4. Copy the result into the Lit submission box.

Click on the ? on the toolbar to get more detailed help and a bit about what works well and what doesn't.

 

[RagnarHairyBreeches]

Thanks for both suggestions. I found it weird the first two went up okay, but not the third.

Computers usually do as their told, and problems are usually the user (ie. me). I may have tweaked something, but I don't think so. Maybe LO came out with a patch between submissions (but I don't recall). That's why I wondered if it was the submission form Lit uses.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I have pretty much the same question. I've got 80 stories, all pasted into the Lit text box. I used to always edit in LibreOffice, but more recently I've stuck to minimal formatting on my phone and not used LO.

Yesterday I formatted a story in LibreOffice and tried pasting it into the text box and previewing, to ensure I'd got all the shedloads of italic tags closed properly. But for the first time ever, neither the text box nor the preview page are showing gaps between paragraphs, making it all pretty unreadable. It looks fine as a .rtf in LibreOffice, though, as usual.

In Word, I'd do Ctrl-Shift-8 to see the formatting characters and ensure the returns were there, but I can't find how to do that in LO. I tried copying and pasting where a return should be, but it just messed up.

Is this a new thing in Lit or LO, is Lit likely to sort the formatting into separated paragraphs if I submit as is, or should I go through adding returns in between every paragraph?

 

[NotWise]

@Kumquatqueen, in LO, select "Toggle Formatting Marks" from the menu, or use "CTRL-F10". The button looks like this.


I imagine the color might vary with your installation. You can also select View->Formatting Marks.

I disable all of the spacing options in LO's paragraph formatting and use a double return between paragraphs. The settings dialog looks like this:

I also keep it left aligned (Alignment tab) and disable hyphenation (Text Flow tab).

I cut and paste into Lit's submission page. I don't recall having any problems with inconsistent behavior.

 

[Duleigh]

I’ve only submitted three stories. So, I’m relatively new here.

I use Libre Office as a word processor. In Libre Office, when I start a new paragraph, a blank line appears between paragraphs. I didn’t set it up that way. That’s the default.

So, I copied the text into the form for submitting to Lit and the same space that was between paragraphs in the word processor was also present in the submission form. Good! That’s what I expected.

With my second submission, it was exactly the same. Well, what else?

However, with my third submission a few days ago the blank line between paragraphs (that was present in Libre Office) was no longer in the submission form. Bugger! I don’t recall changing any setup in the word processor, so I was wondering if anything has happened to the submission form. And was wondering if anyone else has experienced the same thing.

Tedious, fixing it, but not a big deal. I read the draft through a few times in Lit’s submission form in draft mode, and entered carriage returns where appropriate, but as I said, tedious. I’d rather not have to be doing this every time. What's your experience?

I use word and never had a bad issue, however long before submitting I learned that websites don't really like word processors, so I shut off line formatting and "Curly" quotation marks.

Save a headache, if you're not doing a lot of fancy typesetting, save your story as a .doc or .docx and just upload the file instead of pasting into the submission window. I've never had a problem with a file upload.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Save a headache, if you're not doing a lot of fancy typesetting, save your story as a .doc or .docx and just upload the file instead of pasting into the submission window. I've never had a problem with a file upload.

I tried that back in 2019, and the files all got rejected - never had a problem since I started pasting, and Lit says it's quicker that way too.

 

[Duleigh]

I tried that back in 2019, and the files all got rejected - never had a problem since I started pasting, and Lit says it's quicker that way too.

The only rejections I got were for dumb stuff that I screwed up. So IS it quicker? Lately I found if I submit a story in .docx format on Saturday, it will go live on Monday morning. Will I pick up 24 hours by pasting?

 

[Kumquatqueen]

The only rejections I got were for dumb stuff that I screwed up. So IS it quicker? Lately I found if I submit a story in .docx format on Saturday, it will go live on Monday morning. Will I pick up 24 hours by pasting?

No idea - I used to get stories posted in 24-48 hours, then there was the start of the delays era but mine take 2-36 hours except for the two that got lost and needed a PM to Laurel after 10 days.

 

[Duleigh]

No idea - I used to get stories posted in 24-48 hours, then there was the start of the delays era but mine take 2-36 hours except for the two that got lost and needed a PM to Laurel after 10 days.

I'll have to try it. It seems like such a pain in the ass compared to throwing a file name at it and letting Laurel pull it up but we'll see what happens.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I'll have to try it. It seems like such a pain in the ass compared to throwing a file name at it and letting Laurel pull it up but we'll see what happens.

Personally I find ctrl-A, ctrl-C, then ctrl-V quicker than exiting the file and then having to navigate to attach it. particularly as I usually have to make a couple changes.

 

[old_prof]

Easy on, I had similar problems to missing paragraph breaks. It was because I had accidentally typed shift enter rather than just enter. On the word processor, it have me essentially identical spacing (maybe actually identical). But Lit ignores that character in the pasted text. I've gotten pretty good at spotting them now. And I often increase the pace between paragraphs massively, which makes them show up easily.

It's also one of the things I look for on my read throughs in preview on lit.

I noticed them because Laurel bounced one of my early stories for dialog formatting, after I had figured out how to format dialog. But she was complaining because different chunks of dialog were appearing in the same paragraph.

 

[Duleigh]

Easy on, I had similar problems to missing paragraph breaks. It was because I had accidentally typed shift enter rather than just enter.

Enter is known as a carriage return. (Like a typewriter) In HTML it will give you a double space between lines
Shift + Enter is called a Manual Line Break and will just go to the next line in HTML and ePUB. It's especially handy for typing poetry and music lyrics.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

@Kumquatqueen, in LO, select "Toggle Formatting Marks" from the menu, or use "CTRL-F10".

In my version of LO, it's View >> Formatting Marks. The icon is the same, though.

Version: 25.8.0.4

 

[Kumquatqueen]

@Kumquatqueen, in LO, select "Toggle Formatting Marks" from the menu, or use "CTRL-F10". The button looks like this.

View attachment 2610550
I imagine the color might vary with your installation. You can also select View->Formatting Marks.

I disable all of the spacing options in LO's paragraph formatting and use a double return between paragraphs. The settings dialog looks like this:
View attachment 2610552
I also keep it left aligned (Alignment tab) and disable hyphenation (Text Flow tab).

I cut and paste into Lit's submission page. I don't recall having any problems with inconsistent behavior.

Thanks. I visualised the formatting marks and there's a carriage return mark as usual (the fancy backwards P), but for some reason, Find & Replace wouldn't let me find them, either by pressing Enter in the Find field, nor by c&p them, so I couldn't simply replace with doubles.

I've submitted anyway with a note asking Laurel to reject it if the formatting doesn't enable the usual spaced paragraphs. We shall see.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

In LibreOffice Writer, type Ctrl-H to open the find and replace dialog. Check the Regular Expressions checkbox in the middle of the dialog box. In the Find field, type "\n". In the Replace field, type "\n\n".

Away you go.

 

[NotWise]

In LibreOffice Writer, type Ctrl-H to open the find and replace dialog. Check the Regular Expressions checkbox in the middle of the dialog box. In the Find field, type "\n". In the Replace field, type "\n\n".

Away you go.

What @WritingGroup said. You can also use $ in the search box to find paragraph marks, but replacing it with $$ doesn't produce two paragraph marks. It produces two dollar signs.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

In LibreOffice Writer, type Ctrl-H to open the find and replace dialog. Check the Regular Expressions checkbox in the middle of the dialog box. In the Find field, type "\n". In the Replace field, type "\n\n".

Away you go.

Thanks. I'm sure I've just copied and pasted formatting before, without having to know codes - they've never come up in blue before, either. I'll see what happens to this story.

 

[RagnarHairyBreeches]

I started this thread. So, I feel okay in redirecting it somewhat.

So, I submitted a story, it was accepted, and some time later I was looking at it and noticed the formatting was wrong. The section breaks I put in were removed. Okay, there's a problem there - rendering, I think someone called it. I can live with that. It's just a pity you're not told how best to do things.

I edited the text and resubmitted it marked EDITED, as recommended. The only edits I made were to remove the html tags and slip in a few dashes to indicate the end and start of each section.

It took a long time for it to be reviewed, and when it was it was 'sent back,' claiming it was an AI generated story, or words to that effect.

This seems so stupid. Has anyone else come across anything like that?

The easy solution is to delete the edited version and the original stays, but where I had a section break, there is now not even a paragraph break. Which ain't too good.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I started this thread. So, I feel okay in redirecting it somewhat.

So, I submitted a story, it was accepted, and some time later I was looking at it and noticed the formatting was wrong. The section breaks I put in were removed. Okay, there's a problem there - rendering, I think someone called it. I can live with that. It's just a pity you're not told how best to do things.

I edited the text and resubmitted it marked EDITED, as recommended. The only edits I made were to remove the html tags and slip in a few dashes to indicate the end and start of each section.

It took a long time for it to be reviewed, and when it was it was 'sent back,' claiming it was an AI generated story, or words to that effect.

This seems so stupid. Has anyone else come across anything like that?

The easy solution is to delete the edited version and the original stays, but where I had a section break, there is now not even a paragraph break. Which ain't too good.

Submit the corrected text with a Note to the Editor, saying what you've done.

There's a sort of double jeopardy these days, getting stuff published. You really really really need to get the first submission right, get the copy into the best shape you can.

I suggest you copy paste your text into the submission Form, then Preview. That should get you the closest to what it will look like when published. I suspect you've got hidden formatting, if you're submitting a document. Use the Form to get around that.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

If the section breaks were centered, they probably were displaying wrong due to a now fixed bug.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I tried that back in 2019, and the files all got rejected - never had a problem since I started pasting, and Lit says it's quicker that way too.

Me too. I used to upload files until they repeatedly fucked up. I've used the Form for the last five years - WYSIWYG, and never a problem.

 

[EmilyMiller]

If the section breaks were centered, they probably were displaying wrong due to a now fixed bug.

The bug is NOT fixed on mobile browsers, nor it seems on all desktop browsers. Some desktop browsers now render centered text, and bulleted lists correctly.

 

[EmilyMiller]

So, I submitted a story, it was accepted, and some time later I was looking at it and noticed the formatting was wrong. The section breaks I put in were removed. Okay, there's a problem there - rendering, I think someone called it. I can live with that. It's just a pity you're not told how best to do things.

This is an ongoing site bug that is taking a long time to fix. If you refresh the page, the dividers are still there. There are lots of threads about this.

Here is just one:

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/html-tag-problem-with-story-submission.1650734/