It is the usual convention in written text to separate paragraphs with a line break and a tab. Not so on Internet forums, for two reasons: 1) Tab characters tend not to be supported and indentation is difficult or, at best, tedious 2) Space issues are not a concern; nothing's ever going to be printed. In fact, more whitespace is preferred because it tends to increease readability. In particular, clear separation of paragraphs by a blank line (that is, by double-spacing) is important. So the de facto standard is double-spaced anyway. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there is no time when you'd want only a single line break. This is particularly important when copying-and-pasting stories for review, which paste as single line separation and no tab character, requiring the writer to go through, paragraph by paragraph, and increase the spacing. While not difficult, and usually not time-consuming, this is certainly a nuisance, and an unnecessary one. I therefore propose that everything be automatically double-spaced; that is, that all line-break characters be treated as doubled. I believe that this would improve convenience and readability for everyone.
First off, that wiould require modifying the forum editing code, which is more of an issue than it sounds. Second, although that would work well for short stories and novel excerpts, it would NOT work as well with poetry and general posting. What I have suggested to the site owner is a vBulletin custom tag that a user could enclose a story within, that would modify the text within it to display the extra line breaks. I'm not absolutely sure that even that is entirely feasible, but it would be a better solution because it would give control to the user as to whether or not to insert the extra line. I don't think he has had a chance to look into it though.
I know this is an issue for some people, but when I work in MS word I just hit the enter key twice for extra space. It always remains as I originally made it when transferred.
But that would mean your writing for submission would be different than your writing for posting, because that extra line would not fall within manuscript formatting guidelines. I wrote a quickie tool for by computer that can take a document saved as text, and transform it either to text with extra line breaks or HTLM code. I don't bother with it for very short pieces, but it's pretty handy for good-sized short stories.
You're a lot handier with code than I am Cog! Give me broken car or leaky drain and I'm in my element. Programming... I'm just scratching my head!
i'm perplexed... since folks shouldn't be posting very long pieces of work, anyway, why is it being considered such a chore to just insert line breaks 'by hand' wherever there's an indent, after pasting your work in the post window?... are some so lazy that this truly minor task is too much 'work'? admin... is this technical requirement mentioned and explained in the site's guidelines?... if not, it should be, don't you think?
I'm not the admin, but I have a Review Room Workshop Primer in the works. I've just been so busy I have't had much time to put into it.
