When I copy & paste a double spaced Microsoft 2010 Word doc to thread or a new workshop post, it reformats to single space. I have been told by reviewers that when they open a Workshop post and see a big block of print with no spaces between lines, they close and move on. Do I need to retype my whole piece or is there a way to cut paste and retain the Microsoft Word page layout.
I don't use Microsoft at all, but use iPages (a Mac wordprocessing programme.) iPages also gives me an unbroken wad of undifferentiated text whenever I copy/paste onto this forum, so the problem does not lie with Microsoft. There doesn't seem to be much you can do, except go through your postings line by line, and insert a double-space between paragraphs, change ordinary text to italics, etc. It's interesting that I can write reviews for Amazon on iPages, copy and paste my review into the Amazon online form, and all my formatting is retained - including tabbed indents, italics, etc. So somewhere there MUST be a forum format that does retain formatting? Or is that unique to Amazon?
It depends on how much of the paragraph settings the form retains (and it must be able to read them from the original format): one additional line is different from double-space formatting, it just helps achieve the same effect. I don't think you can set paragraph spacing here, so it cannot keep it. In that case, the only thing you could do would be to make a macro in Word that would place an additional paragraph break after each paragraph to save you from doing it manually.
Copying onto this site removes pretty much every kind of formatting imaginable. I figure, If I gotta go through and space everything out manually, it gives me another chance to proofread before posting... Look at the brights side right?
Double spacing is a paragraph attribute, so it isn't preserved when you copy and paste to a text-only destination. You do have to manually edit breaks between paragraphs, but double spacing is neither supported nor desirable in the Writing Workshop. The reformatting recommendations in How to Use the Writing Workshop may help.
