Keeping your formatting when you post from google docs to ao3
I’ve seen weird scripts and shit? You don’t need to do that, I promise! This takes, like, five seconds at most. It’s literally two steps long.
Step one: After you type the very first sentence of your fic, highlight it, and then go into the spacing menu and click on “Add space after paragraph,” like so:
Yay! Now when you hit return you go to a new paragraph with some space between. And maybe you wanna add some italics! Some bold! Let’s say your fic now looks something like this:
Beautiful.
And let’s say you’re done with your fic and you’re gonna post it to ao3! Fucking sweet.
Step two: When you get to that magical ao3 post page, at the top right of the box where you put your fic, there are two magical buttons, and you’re gonna click the one that says “Rich Text” like so:
And now, go back to google docs, “select all” and copy your fic, and just paste that it into the box on ao3:
It kept all your formatting! Sweet! And if you do want to mess with it at this point, there’s all those little commands at the top there, very similar to the ones in google docs.
Okay! Time to publish this thing. I mean I’m not actually publishing it, just previewing it, but still, this is what it would look like if I did:
HURRAY! It kept all my formatting. There’s not weird huge gaps between my paragraphs, either.
I went into detail in this post just to make it as clear as humanly possible, but seriously: you don’t gotta bother with html unless you want to! Use the tools ao3 already has!
Please please do reblog this for you and your fic-writing friends. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
EDIT, BECAUSE I SEE THIS SO OFTEN:
“But I get weird spaces after italics!”
Just highlight the punctuation when you highlight the text to italicize it.
So if you’re writing “I can’t believe she did that!” and you want to italicize the last word, you include the exclamation and quotation mark
So it’s like “I can’t believe she did that!”
instead of I can’t believe she did that !“
