if i don't speak i go crazy

I’m sure someone has already done this but this is what I do

Here we see a nice chapter of LtFAD all indented in the Word doc

Look how nice the indents are in the original Word doc! Alas, they will not be that way for long.

So now I’ve copied and pasted my work into the AO3 Rich Text box. LE GASP. indents are gone, except for a few rogue spots where they managed to survive. So, next I switch to the HTML tab in the top right.

And I scroll down until I see the thing I just underlined. This is the code for the indent. Everywhere else it’s just the < p > so what you want to do is replace all the < p > with what I have underlined. I do this by manually pasting everything BACK into an empty word doc, then pasting this string of code over the < p > at the beginning of every stinkin paragraph. I feel like I tried word’s find&replace feature with “ehhhh” results. 

Something important to remember is to be very careful when your paragraphs begin with quotes, which AO3 codes as ““” So when I’m highlighting stuff to replace the < p >, the mouse automatically highlights the & as well and so I have to just like… click and hit backspace 3 times instead. Super annoying. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this but I tend to do everything the hard way.

So anyway once you have all of the < p >s replaced you can copypaste the word doc back into the HTML tab of AO3 (not the rich text), and when you switch BACK to Rich Text, your indents should be there.