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How to upload MS Word files

Microsoft Word's .doc files are not directly supported by storiesonline's submission wizard. So you must convert them into an acceptable format. MS Word is capable of saving files in multiple formats some of which are acceptable on storiesonline.

Two file formats are supported on storiesonline: HTML files (or Web Pages in MS Word lingo), and plain text files. MS word is capable of saving in both of these formats. If your text contains italics and bolding that you would like to have it show up that way on storiesonline, then you need the HTML (web page) format.

Saving as HTML from MS Word is a simple five-step procedure:

Open your story file in MS Word.

  1. Click on the File menu:

    Click on the 'File' Menu

  2. Select 'Save As...':

    From the 'File' menu, select 'Save As...'

  3. In the 'Save As...' dialog box, from the 'Save as type' menu select 'Web Page, Filtered':
    If the 'Web Page, filtered' option is not available for some reason, you can use the 'Web Page' option, but that produces extremely large files that take much longer to attach AND those files may contain private bits of information that you may not want to send out.

    select 'Web Page, Filtered'

  4. Add something to the file name to be able to distinguish it from the original, something like '_html':

    add some text to the file's name

  5. When asked to confirm, click 'Yes':

    Click Yes to confirm

After the above steps, you'll have an HTML file that you can attach to your submission in the site's submission wizard.

How to hand format HTML files for correct results

The site's submission wizard converts html files into text files upon receipt. This conversion process requires that HTML files conform to a minimum set of standards in order to get proper results. For auto-generated html files like the ones resulting from the above process where MS Word generates the html code, nothing needs to be done.

However, for authors crafting their own html code and submitting it, they need to make sure of few things:

The file must be a fairly valid html file:

  1. It must have a starting <html and a <body tags.
  2. It must have a closing </html> and a </body> tags.
  3. It must have a <head> </head> section.
  4. It must have a character set declaration:
    <meta http-equiv="content-Type" content="text/html; charset=xxxx">
    or <?xml version="1.0" encoding="xxxx"?>
    where the xxxx is the encoding scheme used.
    Because it's more common, the charset statement takes precedence over the 'encoding' statement.
    If neither statements is present, the html converter defaults to windows-1252 encoding
  5. Multiple consecutive <br> tags get converted to a single <p> tag, which means a normal paragraph break.

How to submit stories/chapters with images

To submit stories or chapters with images, you need to submit the story's text and the images to go with it. You can do this two different ways:

  1. Zip/RAR the text and the images and submit one file containing everything.
  2. Make a single submission with multiple files, including the text and all the images.

    select 'Web Page, Filtered'

    if your submission has more than the maximum number of files supported by the wizard (20 files), then you must use the first method of zip/rar your submission

To make this work, your text must contain pointers to where the images go in the text.

If you're submitting an html files with <img > tags in it, then you're done.

If you're submitting plain text, then you need to include something to give the moderators a hint where the images should be. For example:

Chapter 2

[[[ image IMG_001.jpg goes here centered ]]]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent aliquam, justo convallis luctus rutrum, erat nulla fermentum diam, at nonummy quam ante ac quam. Maecenas urna purus, fermentum id, molestie in, commodo porttitor, felis. Nam blandit quam ut lacus. Quisque ornare risus quis ligula. Phasellus tristique purus a augue condimentum adipiscing. Aenean sagittis. Etiam leo pede, rhoncus venenatis, tristique in, vulputate at, odio. Donec et ipsum et sapien vehicula nonummy. Suspendisse potenti. Fusce varius urna id quam. Sed neque mi, varius eget, tincidunt nec, suscipit id, libero. In eget purus. Vestibulum ut nisl. Donec eu mi sed turpis feugiat feugiat. Integer turpis arcu, pellentesque eget, cursus et, fermentum ut, sapien. Fusce metus mi, eleifend sollicitudin, molestie id, varius et, nibh. Donec nec libero.

[[[ image peoplehavingsex001.jpg goes here on the right ]]]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent aliquam, justo convallis luctus rutrum, erat nulla fermentum diam, at nonummy quam ante ac quam. Maecenas urna purus, fermentum id, molestie in, commodo porttitor, felis. Nam blandit quam ut lacus. Quisque ornare risus quis ligula. Phasellus tristique purus a augue condimentum adipiscing. Aenean sagittis. Etiam leo pede, rhoncus venenatis, tristique in, vulputate at, odio. Donec et ipsum et sapien vehicula nonummy. Suspendisse potenti. Fusce varius urna id quam. Sed neque mi, varius eget, tincidunt nec, suscipit id, libero. In eget purus. Vestibulum ut nisl. Donec eu mi sed turpis feugiat feugiat. Integer turpis arcu, pellentesque eget, cursus et, fermentum ut, sapien. Fusce metus mi, eleifend sollicitudin, molestie id, varius et, nibh. Donec nec libero.

Whenever you submit text with images, leave a note in the moderators' notes field in the wizard, pointing out that you're including images and how your image locations are pointed out, so that the moderator knows what to look for in your text to include your images.

Please note that, due to bandwidth limitations, images are treated at the discretion of the moderator. If the images don't add anything to the story and are just gratuitus, then they may get removed. If they are too large then they will be scaled/re-compressed down to a more reasonable/acceptable size.

Restrictions: for images to be included in stories they must meet certain standards:

How to structure submissions' text

To get the best results while submitting stories/chapters to the site, there are few things that you can do:

General stuff:

  1. Always include the story's title and author name in each submitted file/text. This helps minimize the incidents of the wrong file ending up on the site.
  2. Make sure there are two blank lines between paragraphs.
  3. If you can, use unicode (UTF-8 with BOM).
  4. Don't use pre-wrapped text. Let the paragraphs wrap on their own.
  5. Don't use weird/elaborate section dividers. They will get replaced by a simple horizontal rule.

Submission specific stuff:

  1. Single-part stories:
    Include the story's title, author name at the start of the file/text and then the story's text:

    My Story's Title

    by Author name

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent aliquam, justo convallis luctus rutrum, erat nulla fermentum diam, at nonummy quam ante ac quam. Maecenas urna purus, fermentum id, molestie in, commodo porttitor, felis. Nam blandit quam ut lacus. Quisque ornare risus quis ligula. Phasellus tristique purus a augue condimentum adipiscing. Aenean sagittis. Etiam leo pede, rhoncus venenatis, tristique in, vulputate at, odio.

    Donec et ipsum et sapien vehicula nonummy. Suspendisse potenti. Fusce varius urna id quam. Sed neque mi, varius eget, tincidunt nec, suscipit id, libero. In eget purus. Vestibulum ut nisl. Donec eu mi sed turpis feugiat feugiat. Integer turpis arcu, pellentesque eget, cursus et, fermentum ut, sapien. Fusce metus mi, eleifend sollicitudin, molestie id, varius et, nibh. Donec nec libero.

  2. Multi-part stories:
    • Include the story's title, author name at the start of the file/text.
    • Any text that you want on the story's index page needs to be between the author name and the first chapter marker.
    • If a chapter as a particular title include it on the same line as the chapter marker.
    • Never, ever omit the first chapter marker.
    • Put all the chapters/parts in one file and separate them by chapter markers. If you include multiple files, we concatenate them into a single file before we start processing.
    • If you submit multiple files, then include the chapter number at the top of each file.

    My Story's Title

    by Author name

    Author's Note: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent aliquam, justo convallis luctus rutrum, erat nulla fermentum diam, at nonummy quam ante ac quam. Maecenas urna purus, fermentum id, molestie in, commodo porttitor, felis.

    Chapter 1

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent aliquam, justo convallis luctus rutrum, erat nulla fermentum diam, at nonummy quam ante ac quam. Maecenas urna purus, fermentum id, molestie in, commodo porttitor, felis.

    Donec et ipsum et sapien vehicula nonummy. Suspendisse potenti. Fusce varius urna id quam. Sed neque mi, varius eget, tincidunt nec, suscipit id, libero.

    Chapter 2: Chapter title

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent aliquam, justo convallis luctus rutrum, erat nulla fermentum diam, at nonummy quam ante ac quam. Maecenas urna purus, fermentum id, molestie in, commodo porttitor, felis.

    Donec et ipsum et sapien vehicula nonummy. Suspendisse potenti. Fusce varius urna id quam. Sed neque mi, varius eget, tincidunt nec, suscipit id, libero.

  3. Chapter submissions:
    Include the story's title, author name at the start of the file/text as well as the chapter's number:

    My Story's Title

    by Author name

    Chapter 2

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent aliquam, justo convallis luctus rutrum, erat nulla fermentum diam, at nonummy quam ante ac quam. Maecenas urna purus, fermentum id, molestie in, commodo porttitor, felis.

    Donec et ipsum et sapien vehicula nonummy. Suspendisse potenti. Fusce varius urna id quam. Sed neque mi, varius eget, tincidunt nec, suscipit id, libero.

How to turn off MS Word's autoformat

Why do we need to turn off MS Word's autoformat options?

MS Word has some convenient features, like auto formatting a three dashes sequence or three asterisks into a horizontal rule. When this is turned ON, it can be useful when creating documents for print. However, these features cause MS Word to create the most moronic html code and it interferes with the site's html conversion tools.

In order to avoid disappearing horizontal rules or misplaced horizontal rules, it is advisable to turn off MS Word's autoformatting tools.

There is one option that needs turning off, and that's the borders auto formatting. To turn it off there are two steps:

  1. From the Tools menu, select 'AutoCorrect Options...'

  2. In the AutoCorrect panel, click the 'AutoFormat As You Type' tab and check OFF the 'Border lines' box, then click OK:

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