I’m noticing an increase in new fic writers on AO3 who…uh…mayy not know how to format their fics correctly..so here is a quick and VERY important tip
Using a random fic of mine as example..
The left example: ✅✅✅
The right example: ❌❌❌
Idk how many times I’ve read a good fic summary and been so excited to read before clicking on it and being met with an ugly wall of text. When I see a huge text brick with zero full line breaks my eyes blur and I just siiiigh bc either I click out immediately or I grin and bear it…it’s insufferable!
If a new character speaks, you need a line break. If you notice a paragraph is becoming too large, go ahead and make a line break and/or maybe reconfigure the paragraph to flow better. I’m not a pro writer or even a huge fic writer but…please…ty…
This is a good thing to keep in mind! It is often and unfortunate that a really good fic doesn’t get love because its formatting makes it too difficult to read!
I think I figured out why this happens!
AO3's posting form has two modes: Rich Text and HTML. the vast majority of people write in Rich Text editors, aka any normal word processing software (MS Word, Google Docs, Apple Pages, what have you). but when you first open it, the posting form opens in HTML view. if you paste formatted text into HTML view, it erases every piece of formatting, including paragraph spacing.
this is an easy fix. when you go to post your fic, make sure the posting form looks like this:
not like this:
and please spread the word! this is an important piece of computer literacy that nobody is teaching to the new generations and they deserve to know
and the reverse happens when pasting from some places (google doc, ms word) into rich-text where it doubles the spaces between lines. If you look at the html it generates </p><p> </p><p> tags - an extra paragraph containing a single space, which you can search and replace down to a single </p><p> (end paragraph, start new one).
Also, since sometimes working with the rich text editor can be a pain even when copy-pasting from another rich text editor, there is a Google Docs script that will format your document in HTML and make it appropriate for posting into the AO3 html editor. I swear by this and I use it every time I post to AO3. It's literally just a specific Google doc that you can make a copy of that includes a script where you just select a menu option and it will automatically convert formatting to HTML, and using this script + pasting into the HTML editor has bypassed the issues of "extra line breaks between paragraphs" and "a space after italics where there shouldn't be" for me.
The original google doc is here and it includes directions both for getting a copy of it into your own google drive and for using it to prepare your fic for posting on AO3.
Also be aware that if you write in Scrivener it will not keep your formatting when you paste it into AO3, even in the Rich Text editor.
There's a reason I'm only writing one fic in Scrivener (it's the timey wimey one where I need the corkboards function on Scrivener in order to function).
adding on that if you use ellipsus (online alternative to Google docs) there is a native "export to ao3" function which automatically copies an html version of your fic including the spacing and formatting and opens a new tab for a new work in ao3. Just paste into the text box and you'll be set!
Sometimes you can get around this with Userscripts. I use one for Ao3 called “ao3 tweak formatting” on Greasy Fork.
For the ones that I purely a formatting error, I can add line break, remove double lines, align to default, and a bunch of others other stuff.
I’m even able to do it on my phone, which is where I predominantly do my fanfic reading.
