How do I keep the italics if I want to separate the text by paragraphs?

More info, please. Mac or PC? MS Word or something else? And how are you separating the text into paragraphs?

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room It is PC, IE 8, and right here in this answer box, for example.

So you’re talking about italizing paragraphs here, in Fluther? I didn’t get that from your question.

I am talking in general, but I just gave Fluther as an example.

Well, it works differently in Fluther than in a word processing program, because to format text, you’re actually inserting html code. I tested it here, and unless someone else on the site knows better than I, I had to use a _ before and after each paragraph. In Word, it’s easy, you simply break the text into paragraphs and the ital formatting holds.

Hope this helps.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room by “in general” I meant in dialog boxes in different websites, not word processors.

Large blocks of italicized text can be hard to read, whether broken into paragraphs or not, so you might want to reconsider the need for doing it.

If I have several lines to italicize, though, I usually copy the character that codes for it (whether _, <i>. or whatever the required format is), and then paste, paste, paste, paste. That seems to go a little faster than adding the code manually for every segment.

I agree with @Jeruba. One large block of text is hard to read if it’s italicized; if several paragraphs are italicized, I won’t even try. Perhaps instead, you could leave an extra space above and below the paragraphs that form the quotation, and use quotation marks?

On Fluther, the only way is to use the formatting ( _ for italics) before and after each paragraph.

@augustlan . . . i find it distressing that you can’t easily indent paragraphs on the interwebs. i understand the why but am alarmed that it has not been addressed in all these years.

@Blondesjon Indeed. Evil internet, keeping us from indenting. Hmph.

Indents: I use hard spaces to accomplish that. Like this:

   Forced indent

•  Bullet and indent (lovely, isn’t it?)

For the space, use the characters &nbsp (= nonbreaking space) and for a bullet, &bull . In each case, follow those characters with a semicolon.

<&nbsp> Testing
<&bull> Testing with a bullet

If this works, I owe you one @Jeruba!

Boogers. What am I doing wrong?

No angle brackets, and don’t forget the semicolon at the end of each one. It’s & + nbsp + ; without the plus signs and spaces.

(And they won’t look right in the preview window.)

Thanks everyone. I find using quotation marks don’t adequately help a text to stand out from the rest of the text.

And in the same text, I could be quoting myself, which I don’t use quotation marks for and quoting someone else, where I do.

@glacial I was responding to your suggestion above.
@Jeruba I’m trying to unsderstand the Indent…Bullet… & + nbsp + ; thing.

    @flo, my comments on formatting weren’t direct answers to you but responses to posts above by @Blondesjon and @augustlan. You can accomplish indents by forcing hard spaces with the special codes I listed. There are three of them at the beginning of this paragraph. The characters are an ampersand followed by nbsp (no spaces) followed by a semicolon.

    Similarly, a bullet appears when you type an ampersand followed by bull followed by a semicolon.

    Formatting tricks such as these can help avoid the necessity for long passages of italics, which are hard to read.

Ah, I tried it first without the brackets, and when that didn’t work, I threw them in. It’s the semicolon I missed! Let’s try this again…

    Testing
    •Testing with a bullet.

Okay, I think I’ve got this figured out. You have to do the &nbsp + ; once for each space you want to indent. To do the normal indent line, I used four &nbsp + ;, with no spaces between them. To do the bullet line, I did the same, followed by the &bull + ; (again with no spaces). It’s not as pretty as your bullet line, @Jeruba, but at least I know how to do it now. I’ll practice. :)

Right. Each instance of the code is for a single character. A hard space is a character just like any other: letters, numerals, marks of punctuation, cute little hearts, et cetera.

As an aside, how do you do you quoting yourself, and you quoting someone else, in the same text?