I have a problem with text separators that perhaps has already been solved or conveniently worked around by someone else.
I thought I was going to have trouble getting my custom text separators “#” or “***” centered, but that seems to work by default. So, hoorah!
The issue is the required blank line both before and after the separator. Is there a way to get those two lines to be inserted by compile? If not, I have to make sure that there are extra lines at the beginnings and ends of my text files. Which is fragile and human (me) error prone. And anyhoo, the blanks lines are conceptually part of the separator, not part of the prose in the text file itself.
This is on the list–a way to add tab and return characters into form fields like this, so you’d be able to set it up with an extra carriage return on either side or just use multiple blank lines, etc.
Upon further testing, It’s pretty much a crap shoot whether or not custom separators are centered or not. So I can’t really say it works. And the output format that centers them is not the format that can be double spaced.
And that’s too bad. Until that works somehow – by default or under user direction – I’m going to have to do massive editing to any short fiction I try to submit. Because the Shunn standard manuscript format requires both double spacing and centered separators. Ah well. Welcome to beta software.