Question re Word 2007

[shapinglight]

I've spent a few hours this afternoon working on the final story in my Spike/Giles season 7 series (which needs an overall title for when I post it to A03 - any suggestions welcome), which has involved some bits and pieces of re-writing, including deleting an entire scene and coping with the fall out from that later in the story.

But, long and short of it, I'm going to read it through one final time, then it's ready to post. Before that, I need some help, though.

My laptop runs Windows 7 and I have Word 2007 installed. I like Word 2007 fine. But whenever I Select All, Copy and Paste into LJ, the text never includes paragraph breaks. I don't know why not. When I used to post fic on my old laptop (which ran XP, and had an older version of Word), the paragraph breaks would copy and paste just fine.

But I can't work out how to get them to do that with Word 2007, and so have to spend ages whenever I post a fic to LJ going through it and putting in the paragraph breaks manually - which is fine if it's just a drabble or ficlet for sb_fag_ends, but not so clever if it's a long story. Doing that for the penultimate part of the Spike/Giles series the other week took me ages, and was so frustrating, as I'm sure there's a very simple thing you do to make sure the paragraph breaks copy and paste too.

Help? Please? Pretty please?

Comments

[zooey_glass]

Here via my network and commenting as this has frequently annoyed me!

Word 2007's default settings to give extra white space after each paragraph, so you don't do two returns after the paragraph to get a visible break, only one. Only when you copy and paste, other things don't recognise that, so you don't get the blank line.

The only way to get them in after the fact is by editing. If you go to find and replace and choose 'Special' on the replace menu, you can search for one paragraph mark and replace it with two.

To avoid this in future, go to Styles > Normal > Paragraph and edit where it says 'space after paragraph' (I think the default is about 10pt, you just want 0pt). Then it will only display a white line after paragraphs when you manually put one in, so you won't get caught out in future.

Hope this makes sense!

[shapinglight]

Thank you so much. That's so helpful!

ETA: sorry, I'm a bit of a techno Amish. Where do I find Styles in Word 2007?

ETA2: it's okay. I've worked it out. Thanks again for your help.

[slaymesoftly]

Good to know. I'll be trying this to fix this frustrating problem. It's not limited to Word 2007, BTW.

[slaymesoftly]

I don't think I can be very helpful. All I know is that for seemingly random reasons, I've had documents abruptly do that in mid-chapter. I've also noticed it happening every time there is a WORD update. I think I turned off something or other in my preferences and just manually inserted the paragraph breaks by adding extra spaces. Of course, when said document is NOT going on LJ or any of the other sites that can't recognize Word's paragraph breaks, I have to take those extra lines out or it looks odd. I have not determined a way to know ahead of time which it is going to do, so now I type a few paragraphs of something, post it on LJ or DW, look at it to see if I'm going to need to manually insert extra lines between paragraphs, delete it, and do the document accordingly. Either way, what works some places, will not work others and must be done manually - whether it's inserting the lines, or taking them back out because they aren't needed.

[shapinglight]

I think I'm all right now, thanks to zooey_glass.

[yourlibrarian]

Looks like you got this worked out but I can tell you that there are all sorts of issues with copied text on LJ (and also DW) which creates spacing issues. I get it all the time with HTML coded headers or bulleted lists and have never figured out how to fix it other than manually.

[shapinglight]

I think I have it sorted as far the Word default goes on my laptop. 'Course, I still had to go through the stories I'd already written and add all the spaces manually.

Annoying.

[tripleransom.livejournal.com]

Can you try doing a 'save as' to another version of Word or as RTF and then paste into LJ? That might work for you.

I know when I recently submitted a fic to a comm, the mods asked for them in RTF.

Good luck!

[shapinglight]

Thanks. I think I've got it worked out now.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

I presume that you have left 'Styles' set as the default 'Normal'? Change it to 'No spacing'. Then hit Return twice at the end of each paragraph. You will then have a document that will copy and paste over to LJ with the paragraph breaks preserved.

[shapinglight]

Thanks! :)