Help.

[turps]

Does anyone know why Word would suddenly make my spacing collapse when I post a story into LJ? The first part is fine, but the stuff I've been editing is just a jumbled mess with no line breaks. While I can fix it by hand, I'd rather know what's up.

Comments

[puszysty.livejournal.com]

Well double spacing doesn't transfer to html, if that's what you're talking about. You just have to respace it yourself.
If that's not what you're talking about, I have no idea.

[turps33.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's that because the first part of the fic is fine. It does what my stories always do when I post. The second part is a mess though...sigh.

[ihearthings-ii.livejournal.com]

Urgh, I don't know. when I posted my Big Bang, I almost ran out of time because the formatting wouldn't do as I told it to. The font size is still all wonky.

[turps33.livejournal.com]

Man, that sucks. I love Word usually, but when it goes wrong it does it big time.

[ihearthings-ii.livejournal.com]

Yuuuup. It doesn't agree with LJ at all. :s

[adelate]

[not really here]

[ogles icon]

[ihearthings-ii.livejournal.com]

;)

[topaz119.livejournal.com]

In your Word doc, can you see the formatting symbols (dots for spaces, etc?) Can you tell if your hard paragraph break (a paragraph mark) have somehow gotten replaced by a soft break (looks like an arrow that goes down and then left.)?

Also, were you copying and pasting from another document or an email or to/from googledocs? (If someone is betaing for me on the fly, I'll be sending them bits and pieces however I can.) Sometimes the paragraph breaks get messed up in the back-and-forthing.)

If you're posting with a client or in RTF mode, maybe try switching over to the pure HTML posting mode and see if it catches the breaks that way (but watch in case it loses other formatting like bold/italic/underline.)

[turps33.livejournal.com]

I turned on the formatting symbols and found where the problem is, except I can't seem to fix it.

There's a hard break, then a blank line which I can't delete. If I add another hard break it goes under the blank line. So I have no idea what's going on. Plus, if I highlight that section it highlights over two lines and not one like the rest.

Oh well. It won't take that long to fix by hand. Thanks for the help :)

[breny.livejournal.com]

As the other poster said, you can see your formatting in word and that can help you figure out what the problem is. However, you have to have the formating set to view and I think the default is hide. There is a small icon on your edit toolbar that sorta looks like a pi symbol. That toogles the view/hide. If you don't have it, you may need to edit your toolbar and add that button.

[turps33.livejournal.com]

I did that and can see now. Thank you!

[turloughishere.livejournal.com]

I hope you managed to fix it. Word is a tool of the devil!

This reminded me of something I've been thinking of when I read your stories - do you use smart quotes for a reason or is it just Word automatically inserting them? If I just copy and paste a quote from one of your stories to my website the smart quotes makes the coding all wonky so I've always got to remember to replace them with ordinary " and '.

[turps33.livejournal.com]

It must be Word adding them because it's nothing I do on purpose.

I wonder if turning smart quote off will solve my issues. It can't hurt to try I guess.

[turloughishere.livejournal.com]

It can never hurt to try. (Word's so evil, adding things all over the place and making the users' lives difficult!)

[nopseud]

Bugger. That Word line break issue happened to me once, and I can't remember exactly what caused it. I *think* it's something to do with copying and pasting, where Word creates some weird style from the pasted in text and then anything which you type into the area ends up with the same crappy formating -- basically, it's faking line breaks but there aren't in fact 'real' breaks there when you copy and paste out again.

Try selecting the whole document, then setting the paragraph style to normal.

[turps33.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it's happened to other people. Which sounds bad but it's driving me nuts.

Try selecting the whole document, then setting the paragraph style to normal.

I tried that and it's still a no go. That rouge line is still killing the rest of the fic.

[nopseud]

Hmm. Have you tried opening a new document, and copypastaing the two halves above and below the rogue line into it, without actually copying the rogue line?

Also possibly worth a try, save the file as plain .txt format, or the closest that Word does these days.

(Word! Tool of Satan! Install OpenOffice instead!)

[rikes]

I don't know if you still need help, but just in case:



Check that the box I marked in red shows the same style for the entire document.

[turps33.livejournal.com]

I tried that and while it looks the same in Word as soon as I post into LJ the bottom half collapses again. I have no idea how to fix it.

[thelemic.livejournal.com]

What version of Word are you using?

(because I have that a lot with Word 2007--but if you have an earlier version I have no idea)

[turps33.livejournal.com]

If I'm looking at the right thing it's Word 97.

Thanks for trying :)