Why does post format change when posted?

  • Unknown's avatar
    carolwelsh · Member ·

    I’m not sure why this keeps happening, but when I post a poem, the format changes once I hit publicize. Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong? I copy and paste…could that be the reason? Do I need to retype the whole poem into the post box to keep the format from changing? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    absurdoldbird · Member ·

    Two things you need to know. First, if you’re posting from a word processor, like Word:

    Microsoft Word

    Second you need to know how to format poetry so that it will show up the way you want, in your posts:

    http://en.support.wordpress.com/writing-and-formatting-poetry/

    I hope that helps.

  • Unknown's avatar
    carolwelsh · Member ·

    Oh my gosh, yes, that helps…but maybe I just won’t post poems anymore, yikes! Anyway, thanks!

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    @carolwelsh
    As you have been copying and pasting text from elsewhere without using either icon 5 or icon 6 in Row 2 of the visual editor, please see here http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/#pasting-text

    Then go to Settings > Writing and select “ ___ WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” and then scroll down and click “Save Changes.”

    Posts > All Posts, change all your latest posts to Draft, click Update, change them back to Published, click Update again. (You can edit all of them at once: tick the square in front of their titles then select Edit from the Bulk Actions dropdown and click Apply.)

  • Unknown's avatar
    carolwelsh · Member ·

    I’ll try all of that…but I’m worried all of this may be a bit beyond me. Thanks!

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    It’s not as difficult as it seems. :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    absurdoldbird · Member ·

    If you use Windows, the simplest thing is to copy and paste from notepad, which you should find on your computer. (There is a similar program on a Mac, but I’m not a Mac user and can’t remember what it’s called). It retains the line breaks but leaves out all the incompatible coding that Word dumps in.

    Also – here’s a quick thing to remember:

    to break a line for a paragraph, hit your return or enter key once.
    to break a line for single spacing (ie, at the end of a line for a new one) hold down the shift key while hitting the return or enter key.

    Even those couple of tips should help you with most poetry.

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