HELP: How can I preserve my formatting when I post a chapter?

[unrepentantAuthor]

Hi there. I just posted a fanfic for the first time in years (how thrilling!) but was concerned to discover that all my lovely paragraph indentations disappeared, the indent button indents all text and not just the first line, and it would be a bother to edit the whole chapter besides. Does anyone have any advice on preserving formatting, especially if I want to use italicisation or similar formatting eventually?

 

[Misfit Angel]

As far as I know, there's no reasonable way to indent just the first line of a paragraph on these forums. As far as italics and bold and stuff, I think that's something you'll have to do manually. I just manually insert formatting tags into my story documents so I don't have any further experience with copy/pasting from things like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.

 

[AetherX]

Hello and welcome back to posting fanfiction on forums, where everything's a workaround and formatting is a Sisyphean task.

The common fanfic style of double spacing between paragraphs comes from not being able to indent, so that's one workaround. It doesn't look quite as nice imo, but it works. If you're really keen on having perfect control over your formatting, then writing with format tags is the way to go for sure. If you want to indent just the first line then you can wrap only the first line in indent tags, but that's pretty fiddly. Copying and pasting italics/bold/underline from MS Word has always worked just fine for me without any special considerations. Always worth previewing your post and giving it a quick once over anyway.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

Thanks for the advice. I guess I'll manage!