After Literature

After Literature uses a blogging platform, which kind of expects the content to be prose, where a user would just keep typing in order to wrap single spaced lines, and would press return only to indicate a paragraph break.

If you are typing directly into the Editor dialog box, a "hard return" is interpreted as a paragraph break, not a line break, and an extra line will be inserted.

To create a single-spaced line break, you must do a "soft return" which means holding down the shift key, while pressing return. <shift+return>.

If you are copying and pasting an entire poem directly from a word processing program, some programs fare better than others. This is because all word processing programs embed their own formatting codes, which are then being translated into HTML for the web. Current advice from the platform hosts is to strip out the formatting that your word processor has applied, before pasting into ANY web format.

For the Mac, this is done using the basic text editor bundled with every mac: TextEdit. You paste your piece into a new TextEdit document, then from the Format menu select "make plain text". A warning dialog comes up that you are about to lose all formatting. Say ok. The formatting codes will be stripped out. You then copy the stripped piece, and paste it into the post editor dialog at AL. If you wanted bold or underline or other formatting, you will have to re-apply it in the web interface using the post editor dialog formatting commands.

For the PC, the basic text editor is "Notepad".   I'm not sure if you have to do anything special in Notepad. I think it automatically strips your formatted text down to plain text, but I am a Mac user, so I can't be sure on that.

Last updated on February 22, 2010 at 6:29AM by Shari-Lyn McArthur