Want to Space Your Poetry?

Before I begin, this is not my tip. I credit Andrei Z. with telling me about it over two years ago in a comment somewhere. Thank you, my friend. You’ve saved many a poem. ;D (Psst, go read his stuff. He's got some beautiful poetry to lose yourself in.)

Hi, fellow poets!

I have a brilliant tip to share with you all, and, because I refuse to bury the lede….BLANK CHARACTERS!

If you’ve spent any time on Vocal, you know how frustrating it is to not be able to keep your formatting, whether you wrote your story by hand, on Google Docs, Notes, or anywhere else. For some reason, even if you click the “paste with formatting” option, Vocal deletes literally all Tab indentations, blank lines, repeated spaces, and even lists. It happens inside Vocal's own word processor. Like, wtf?

Anyway, the point is that I come with a solution!

Blank characters (also known as empty, invisible, and whitespace characters) are basically spaces on steroids. I don’t know how they work precisely, but they insert some indicator that a character is present, even though our eyes see nothing but a blank space. In other words, these are characters with no visible outputs, and yes, they hold up to Vocal’s format evisceration. Technically, they’re Unicode characters and require a code or a series of other buttons to insert, depending on your computer type (PC vs Mac).

If you have a PC, the code is U+0020 or Alt+255 for a basic space.

If you have a Mac, do Option+Spacebar.

I recommend looking up the Unicodes for empty spaces, as there are different types and sizes of spaces you can choose from. I imagine this might be useful for PC users more than Mac since you have more buttons to press.

One more thing to note: If this doesn’t work for you, try playing around with a minimum number in a row. I usually have to use several blank characters in a row for Vocal to recognize them. And no, this does not apply to regular spaces or Tab-presses. And also no, I don’t know why…lol.

And there you have it!

Please enjoy your new found formatting freedom! And....               happy writing!

Leave any questions in the comments and I'll try to answer them.

Cheers! :D