SciFi & Fantasy Fiction and Stories by Z N Singer

Un-moderated and therefore unpublished...what the heck? What am I supposed to do for this to be official, or whatever this means? grr

Yes, I know the post has no spaces between paragraphs. It does in Modify mode. I’ve asked a staff member to have a look.

Apparently the lack of space is just me? well, if they say so.

Good grief, getting approved and published takes a long time.

I guess it takes the longest the first time? It would make sense. anyway now Chapter One is up - with spaces, I’m happy to report, though the method is not without hardship. I’ll have to experiment with uploading html. OpenOffice is supposed to be good at that, but I haven’t had occasion to experiment before.

So what was the spacing problem? I write in OO, switch to Word, then find and replace the paragraph non-printing character, and switch back to OpenOffice. Did you find a better way?
PS I avoid Modify mode ~~when I try it, it just louses up my apostrophes.

Z N Singer replies: "Actually, I just worked around it - If I added two spaces that showed up. Sounds like you actually found the problem. What paragraph non printing character? (and yes, I had noticed my apostrophes had turned into those characters computers use to say ’huh? I have no idea what that was’. But I hadn’t known it was Modify doing that. Thanks for telling me!)"

Alternatively, I know OO saves a good html, I may try uploading that sometime.

No, I just use a different work-around. I replace single paragraph marks with TWO paragraph marks. ~~You can toggle non-printing symbols visible/invisible. In OO, there’s something that looks like a backward capital P with two descenders. Click on that, and you see tiny arrows, showing indents; paragraph P’s; dots for spaces and so forth.
I’d like to know how the html upload goes.
~~Good luck and good writing.

Z N Singer replies: "I think I’ll be doing it anyway, because I’ve must realized (facepalm): THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT DOESN’T HAVE SPACES EITHER! I’m using INDENTS, and those aren’t supported, like most web-publishing places. Which means your quick ’find and replace’ technique to create the spaces painlessly is the way to go. Oh well, at least I realized."

I’ve switched to a different trick: I don’t use TAB INDENTS ~~hitting the tab key at the beginning of each paragraph~~ I use the first line indent in the left margin. In the top keyboard, on the page width line, at the left margin there are two small arrows, top and bottom.
I move the TOP arrow over to the right about 1 inch. I don’t have to do anything more to get paragraph indents, and the work translates into Elfwood nicely. I do double paragraph space between scenes, though, and I also write the first few words of a scene change ALL CAPS and BOLD, but that’s because of a different problem. (Look at my ’TWIP: 8.1’ for the finished look)

Z N Singer replies: "Interesting. Sounds like formatting first line indents in the paragraph style. I’ll have to try that. I really prefer the traditional look."

That’s as close as I’ve been able to come to the classic printed page look here. The hardest part my new system was/is changing the near-reflex of return-tab-double-stroke I’ve used since learning the keyboard.
The Elfwood paste system still does NOT permit centering, which I like to use for quotes and major scene shift markers. Yes, you can go through the text file and center any marker manually, but since there is no search function, you have to locate the marker manually too. Quite a pain.