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1. thebardonthehill
   Member
   May 13, 2011, 2:13 AM

   My blog is poetry and one of the first things I saw was that it's a little difficult to format poetry here. At Support - Writing and Formatting Poetry, I've learned to add line breaks by shift+enter in the visual editor and I've learned to preserve extra spaces. The poems are formatted correctly on my home page when published. Among the Tag Poems, mine appear the same as others, the format lost and looking a bit like a paragraph. So, here's the problem: the poems that look fine on my home page are jumbled in my archives (such as a categories widget, which I've temporarily removed because of that). They look like they do on the Tag Poems page. But I've seen others whose poems are formatted correctly in their archives.

   What I'm I doing wrong, or overlooking?

   Thanks,
   thebardonthehill

   The blog I need help with is thebardonthehill.wordpress.com.

2. raincoaster
   Member
   May 13, 2011, 2:52 AM

   If you could provide links to those examples, perhaps we could help. I suspect those blogs are using themes whose archives show the entire post, rather than an excerpt.

3. thebardonthehill
   Member
   May 13, 2011, 2:57 AM

   http://thebardonthehill.wordpress.com/category/my-poems/

   I've moved the category widget back onto my blog so you can see the three poems that are there.

   thebardonthehill

4. timethief
   Member
   May 13, 2011, 2:59 AM

   Examples would be good.

   On another note you appear to be copying and pasting as I see fonts of different sizes and therein could be the source of your problem. frequently created by copying and pasting text without using the appropriate icons either 5 ( Paste as Plain Text ) or ( Paste from Word) in Row 2 of the Visual editor to strip extraneous code and insert the remainder into a post. http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/#row-2

   Do you have this enabled on your blog? Settings > Writing and select “ ___ WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” and then click “Save Changes.”

5. timethief
   Member
   May 13, 2011, 3:05 AM

   In the majority of themes, posts in category or monthly archive pages show up just as they do in the main posts page. But in some themes ... read more > http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/full-posts-in-archive-pages/

6. thebardonthehill
   Member
   May 13, 2011, 3:07 AM

   Raincoaster may be correct since I see that if I click on "read full post" on a poem in the archives, it does show it in the correct format then.

   I suppose there isn't any cure for that in the theme I've chosen?

   And, to timethief - no, I haven't been doing that properly. I'll take a close look at what you've said and work on that next time. I'm a rookie in all this and I'm a bit surprised at how much I've been able to do on my own so far. WordPress makes it relatively easy on most things.

   Thanks for the support.
   thebardonthehill

7. raincoaster
   Member
   May 13, 2011, 3:23 AM

   You might find it easiest to format offline, in Windows Live Writer or something similar, and then upload. That way you always have a copy, too.

8. 1tess
   Moderator
   May 13, 2011, 3:34 AM

   With MistyLook, you can set your poems into the custom excerpt module so they will appear as you like to see them in category and archive pages:
   http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/category/excerpt/

   But do pay attention to what timethief told you about pasting from Word or other already formated sources:
   http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/formatting-doesnt-hold-in-archives?replies=6#post-603389

   Paste as plain text and format your text in the WordPress.com editors!

9. 1tess
   Moderator
   May 13, 2011, 3:35 AM

   ~~hi raincoaster:
   forgot about offline editors for formating as well…

10. raincoaster
    Member
    May 13, 2011, 3:36 AM

    And thanks for the Mistylook update. I'm not up on themes particlarly.

11. timethief
    Member
    May 13, 2011, 3:53 AM

    There's also this section we can share with you > Writing and Formatting Poetry > http://en.support.wordpress.com/writing-and-formatting-poetry/

12. thebardonthehill
    Member
    May 13, 2011, 2:08 PM

    Thanks for all the help.

    thebardonthehill

13. timethief
    Member
    May 13, 2011, 2:19 PM

    You're welcome from me. :)

14. johnstevensjs
    Member
    May 20, 2011, 4:23 PM

    I'm someone else with a poetry blog who has great difficulty with formatting. This discussion helps but there is still one basic problem.

    ... try as I might, I cannot preserve the line spacing when I copy draft poems over from Word. I've tried all the tips above: pasting as plain text, pasting from Word, and selecting preformatting. The single line spaces always revert to the double line spaces of new paragraphs. I have to go through the poem line by line adjusting every space with the backspace & enter keys.

    Am I doing something wrong? Is it because I use a Mac with 'Word for Mac' as my word processor?

    I'd be really grateful for advice.

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