Hi all,

We have some bad news. We learned today of an issue posting from Google Docs on iOS to the site. Basically, when you paste the text into the site (or most other places on your phone that we could see), certain special characters are not being correctly copied, so when they paste you get something that looks like — when all you wanted was an em-dash.

The good (?) news is that this is a widespread bug caused by either Apple or Google, and not anything we did, and is affecting other sites, including AO3, and other apps such as Apple Mail, Notes, and so on. Unfortunately, this makes work-arounds a little tricky. Posting on desktop is currently unaffected by the bug, but we know not everyone has access to desktop. If that applies to you, then the best option is probably a free Office 365 account, but even here we found during testing that copy/pasting from Docs to Word that certain formatting such as italics and bolding were lost. Copying from Docs to Word to EF also created weird line breaks. Instead, we would recommend saving your Docs file as a Word doc by clicking the three docs from the Docs menu (not from within the file) and selecting “Save as Word file (docx)”, then moving the copy of the file to the Files app on your phone. Then, in the Word app, you can choose to open files from the Files app.

Copying from Word directly does still have some issues, including loss of formatting such as italics/bolding. Alternatively, you could paste from Docs into a text file, but that formatting will still be lost.

We are exploring more permanent coding solutions, but since this seems to be a bug introduced by Apple or Google, and occurs in a wide variety of settings on iPhones, we may be limited in our ability to solve this one.

For April event fics, we know time is running out. If you need to get your fanwork up and don’t have time for work-arounds, please email us at elysianfieldsarchive@gmail.com and we will see what we can do to accommodate you.