Bullet Points in Articles

Article Writing & Marketing Insights

Bullet Points in Articles

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From the author support emails today, Peter asks, “How do I get bullet points to show up in my ezine articles? They’re there when I create my article and then disappear when I cut and paste into your form.”

The first fundamental problem is that you are copying from MS Word directly into our article submission interface. This is a mistake unless you’ve already disabled smartquotes. Better to copy/paste from a true text editor (MS Word is not a text editor).

The answer to your question: You need to include UL and LI tags to form bullet points. The cousin to HTML bullet points is a numbered list: OL and LI tags. UL gives BULLETS, OL gives NUMBERED LISTS. Hope this helps.

3 Quick Steps To Adding BULLETS To Your Article:

Step 1) Copy and paste from WORD to your favorite true text editor. I use EditPlus. UltraEdit, Notepad, and Notetab are popular choices.

Step 2) Add the UL and LI tags, any B tags or I tags amd remove any smartquotes you left in there by accident.

Step 3) Copy and paste from your text editor to your EzineArticles article submission interface.

Done. You’ve got bullets.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on January 24, 2006 at 3:36 pm

Views 864 |

3 Comments »

Dan writes:

Its a shame that the grammar and spelling check in word is so fantastic but then its impossible to easily transfer formatted text to the web, they should really fix that. I hate relying on notepad.

Comment provided January 25, 2006 at 9:37 pm

Dina Giolitto writes:

Hi Dan,

I recently learned that Dreamweaver has a “paste HMTL” feature - so you can lift (control-c for copy) an article from EA’s “EzinePublisher” window and then hit shift+control+V and paste the html-formatted text right into your web page in the design window.

Or you could paste it into the source code too, that would work.

Dina

Comment provided January 26, 2006 at 9:18 am

Carl Bromley writes:

Dan and all,

I use Textpad which is a reasonably priced shareware - it doesn’t litter the landscape with markup and has spellcheck aboard. I’ve used it to clean up hidden characters in Excel data files. I’ve done “bulk replace” of string A with string B in about 85,000 lines in seconds… I use its “find in files” function to find code snippets. I also use its Macro function to store several signatures for Yahoo groups. After recording, I just have to click the right macro to have a signature ready for ‘copy and paste’.

Good luck, Carl

Comment provided January 30, 2006 at 1:58 pm

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