I am trying to copy and paste pages from my synopsis and MS to send to a potential agent and lose all of my formatting in the process. I am using apple Pages and emailing in gmail. I cannot even keep double spacing in this process. Can anybody shed some light on how to not lose formatting between pages and gmail. Thanks in advance
The problem is likely due to the fact that you are pasting from Apple Pages -- I think the Mac clipboard is a little different than, say, Microsoft Word. If you can somehow get your desired text into Word with formatting, save that and copy from Word, Gmail will likely retain your formatting. I am not aware of a workaround for your problem when copy/pasting from Pages, though.
Hey there, Garball. I too am Mactastic. I did a little experiment to see if I couldn't help. I pulled some text out of MS Word on my Mac and the copy-paste into Gmail respected the double spacing of lines that wrap without carriage return, and also carriage returns themselves. I pulled text out of Scrivener and while carriage returns were respected, line spacing for wrapped text was not. It went to single space. I pulled text out of Pages and got the same result you already mentioned, neither line spacing for wrapped text nor carriage returns were respected. Yet another example of being Mactastic in a PC biased world. :/ I'll keep playing with Pages to see if there isn't some help I can lend you. EDIT: ~ I was wrong about copy-past from Pages. Carriage returns are respected, but not wrapped line spacing.
Are you emailing an attached doc. or trying to paste it into the body of the email? Never mind, I see Wreybies has it covered. I also have a Mac and send Word docs all the time to people without trouble.
Do you happen to have TextEdit on your Mac? I have had fantastic results copying and pasting my iPages documents to TextEdit, sending them as attachments in email, and having them get picked up by PC users with complete formatting intact, including italics, tabs, spacing, bold, underlines, etc. In fact I've had no problems at all, thus far. I'd send a tester to your recipient first, though, to make sure.
It is not the attachments that I am having a problem with; it is the pasting into the body. Writing e-queries and agents want anywhere from 5 to 50 pages. When I cut and paste, I end up with a wall of single spaced, left justified text
If you're sending a substantial amount of text in the body of an email, I'd advise against trying to introduce double-line spacing, or much other formatting. Plainer emails are much easier to read. When I send work by email, I copy-paste it from my word processor into Notepad. This strips away all excess formatting. I then add an extra line between paragraphs if necessary, and copy-paste it again to the email. This results in a very clean, readable message, which definitely won't mess up during transition. When the person on the other end receives it they will be able to read it on their computer or their phone equally well. They will be able to print, copy, and edit it without difficulty. The same would likely not be true if I copied directly from my word-processor, or enforced double-line spacing. Unless the agent specifically asks for the email query to be set out in a certain way, I would go for the method I describe above, so as to make it as readable as possible. To my mind a clean, clear message looks a lot more professional than one that tries to follow standard manuscript format, and ends up all over the place as a result.
