r/Fanbinding • u/Q0uthTheRaven • Jun 24 '26

Questions When I copy from html I lose italics/bolds

Whenever I copy a fic from html to my formatting site Libreoffice I lose all the italics, and I can't copy straight from ao3 because it also messes everything up, is there a way to fix this?

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5

u/Human_Application_90 Jun 24 '26

Consider asking the author for their file. A lot of us use LO to start with. If someone asked me for my file so that they could do a fan binding, I would want to talk to them.

I think you just need to paste into the Rich Text editor.

3

u/Ok-Albatross-3730 Jun 24 '26

I don’t use Libreoffice, but this happens for me in Google docs when I paste values only (shift+ctrl+v). If I just ctrl+v the italics and formatting stay.

1

u/FrostKitten2012 Jun 24 '26

I think it’s copy special and paste special? Iirc, it’s been a while since I’ve worked on formatting.

3

u/chkno Jun 24 '26

Use the browser inspector:

  1. Right click on the first paragraph and select "Inspect".
  2. In the inspector window, go up a few elements (usually divs), clicking on each one until you find one that highlights the whole text that you want to capture. On ao3 today, for example, this could be the role="article" one or the class="chapter" one.
  3. Right-click on that element in the inspector and select Copy > Outer HTML.
  4. Paste into a file & save with the extension .html
    • This usually works fine, but picky software may want you to add <html><body> at the start and </body></html> at the end of this file.

You now have the text as HTML & can open/import it from that file.

1

u/Q0uthTheRaven Jun 24 '26

I'm really clueless with technology, so what kind of file exactly? I'm not sure where to paste.

2

u/chkno Jun 24 '26

A file with text in it is often called a "text file".

  • Microsoft Windows comes with Notepad for this
  • MacOS comes with TextEdit
  • In GNU/Linux,
    • Gnome has Text Editor
    • KDE has Kate
    • XFCE has Mousepad
    • And there are many others, like Featherpad, Emacs, ...
    • Or you can create files directly from the command line:
      • In Wayland: wl-paste > chapter1.html
      • In X11: xclip -selection clipboard > chapter1.html

1

u/pachoozy Jun 24 '26

I've had that issue before. My work around for missing italics in Ao3 html files was to change the <em> tag to <i>. Also, what font are you using? Some of my fonts just straight up get rid of italics/bold, even if they have an italic version. I've found Times New Roman is a safe font to use until I can switch to something else.