Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I often post here requesting that book descriptions be corrected.

Often, book descriptions will have formatting in italics, for example if it references the title of the book.

It seems like there's a 50/50 chance whoever fulfills the request forgets the italics or applies formatting incorrectly. I've taken to including extra spaces in the HTML formatting < i>like this< /i> so that the librarian doesn't really have to do any HTML formatting at all but only has to delete the extra spaces…but that still often gets ignored/missed, and I have to ask for a correction.

To save everyone time, is there any way I can simply "escape" the formatting so that the formatting displays (rather than applying to the text) so that the description can just be copied and pasted?

(I am not familiar with HTML outside of what is used in Goodreads reviews and couldn't find anything online.)

I don't think there's a way to do that

I would put the description with all the formatting (not using extra spaces that can easily be missed by the librarian) and I would specify in my request this detail, maybe a simple "please be sure to replicate the formatting I used" (in bold ;-))

Moloch wrote: "I don't think there's a way to do that

I would put the description with all the formatting (not using extra spaces that can easily be missed by the librarian) and I would specify in my request thi..."

Without using extra spaces in the formatting, the words will just show up in italics or bold and the librarian adding the description will have to add the formatting themself. Removing the extra spaces is less work.

It would be helpful to mention in the post that you have added the HTML for the formatting with extra spaces

Something like this:

**Please note HTML for formatting has been added to description, but will need extra spaces removed**

Jennifer wrote: "To save everyone time, is there any way I can simply "escape" the formatting so that the formatting displays (rather than applying to the text) so that the description can just be copied and pasted?"


You can replace "<" with &lt ; and ">" with &gt ; (remove the space before the semicolon, I added it so they don't turn into < or > automatically).
e.g. <b> </b>

Javier wrote: "Jennifer wrote: "To save everyone time, is there any way I can simply "escape" the formatting so that the formatting displays (rather than applying to the text) so that the description can just be ..."

Amazing! Thank you so much!