Fic Posting Formatting Issues

[aadarshinah]

Is it just me, or have a lot of the fics recently been having random italics issues?

[WarpGirl]

My chapter was supposed to have certain things underlined but it didn't happen (not that I cared too much). But I haven't seen any italics issues.

[Distracted]

There certainly are some italics issues in the latest Round Robin chapter. And it doesn't look like the typical "missing off code" issue where a ship's name or an internal thought starts out in italics and then the italics never get turned off. Peculiar.

[Aquarius]

Is it just me, or have a lot of the fics recently been having random italics issues?

What, specifically, are you referring to?

[aadarshinah]

Well, like the new chapter of Slopes of Andoria. And a couple other fics (which have since been corrected)... it's more an oddity than anything else, and makes the programmer in me itch to take a look at the code. But that's the only one actively wrong at the moment that I've noticed.

[Aquarius]

I'll check it out in a few minutes.

I know that sometimes, for whatever reason, I've had problems with certain people's documents but not others...it's like the document holds onto code after edits have been made or something, so sometimes issues similar to this happen, like bold or italics or font size or something never get turned off somehow.

I'm going to try something, hang on...

[aadarshinah]

okay...
*twiddles thumbs*
I'm inclinded to think it's the fault of the code editor. Or the code editor programmer. Some of them are smart enough to catch the extra tags and close them automatically. Not all of them though. You don't handcode these, do you? No, I see a php tag in the link. Hmmm... I must ponder this...

[Aquarius]

Honestly? You're better off taking that up with the admins who handle the techie stuff. My job is to copy, paste, close the gaps that often occur, and basically fix stuff the best I can. I've found a way around this kind of problem in the past--as I said, I've learned to expect this kind of problem when I upload certain people's fics, so I take this weird little extra step with theirs and I have no idea why it works, it just does.

But every so often, a new one will pop up and... .

[Aquarius]

Okay, hopefully that looks better now. My little trick didn't work, so I had to go in and un-italicize it all by hand, so if there's now something that was supposed to be italicized that isn't--sorry.

Probably related--the scene break lines you put in the document didn't come through on the paste into the editor, I had to add those, so my suggestion is this: keep the formatting simple and use "* * *" to indicate a scene break. Oftentimes documents paste in with superfluous spacing between the paragraphs, so when lines like that don't come through, it's hard for us to figure out where they go. Just doing asterisks with spaces in between will let us know, and it's not extra work for us to put the lines in since we have to do it any way.

Thanks.

[Lady Rainbow]

My latest chappie has the opposite problem. I've lost all my bold, italics, etc.

Should I hand-code and resend to you guys? I can do that if I have to.

[Alelou]

I don't know if it makes any difference, but I always submit work to TS in compatability mode with the old Word instead of Office 2007. It seems to create fewer problems.

[honeybee]

I still have the file, LR. I'll try and fix. Usually, if I use Safari and not firefox, it retains the bold and italics - but something must have happened. I'll try again.

[Aquarius]

To the manual coding questuon--no. My understanding, in very non-technical terms, is that our editor is designed for no coding at all on our end, and adding code results in a messed up document.

Obviously if the problem is growing more prevalent, we have a technical issue we need to iron out. If you spot something in the future, please post it in the bug reports section. That way the tech admins will see it if we don't.

Thanks.

[honeybee]

This was a technical issue, technically, but one for which there is a workaround.

When I upload fics, more often than not, Firefox keeps the line breaks as is, but strips out bold and italics. Safari keeps bold and italics, but adds an extra line break. So, I use Firefox if there's no or very little bold and italics - and Safari if there is a lot of that, but then I have to delete all the extra line breaks.

This time around, it was my fault, LR. I forgot I was using Firefox when I uploaded your fic! I should have noticed, but I didn't. So sorry! It's fixed now.

[WarpGirl]

Does Firefox keep underlining?