No italicized words in the article sampler?

[Lor]

Has this question come up before? I think, especially with the names of books, ships and the Latin names of plants, the work would add professionalism if it showed those italics? Any thoughts? If it's come up before, I can't find it and I'd love to hear why this is omitted or has never been an element visible in the short summary samples. I'm sure it's come up, and I'm just not in the loop.

[Debbi]

The sample is just plain text so words can't be italicized in it. I use quoatation marks in the sample to indicate an italicized word.

[Lor]

Thanks Debbi. I do understand it's plain text and I know words can't be italicized in it. It doesn't have that function. Maybe this quest really belonged in the suggestion board. I'll think about how to indicate italics. Not sure I'd want to use quotations marks around the Latin names of plants. Need to think about this. And hoping TPTB will find a solution.

[Debbi]

Since the buyer will be using the actual document for publication, the sample not having italics doesn't really matter in the case of plant names, I don't think. It's possible that the buyer might think you aren't formatting the names properly and pass on the article but I doubt that happens often.

I seem to remember this discussion in another forum post in the past few months. If I remember where, I'll post a link here.

It would be nice to be able to italicize, underline, and bold in the sample like we do here in the forums though

[Celeste Stewart]

Until then, you could use *asterisks* as a way to indicate that a word is italicized along with a note in the short summary explaining that the sample contains asterisks indicating italics while the Word document is properly formatted.

[Lor]

Thanks, ladies. I appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. Regardless of what the buyer actually receives, first impressions do count. I think Celeste's solution is something that might work for me. How's this?

"The Latin names of the plants listed are italicized in the content received." Or some such thing. I'm not sure symbols or characters are needed around the words and this seems professional to me. I'll have a look at some other garden writers offerings here to see how they got around it as well.

Thanks again
Lorraine

[4rumid]

I asked about this too when I was brand new here a few months ago. My solution has been to put a note, like the one you were considering, at the top of the long excerpt (as opposed to in the short summary). Depending on the article, I've inserted notes like:

"Note: In actual article, headings are in bold; examples are in italics."

"Please note CAPITALIZED text below appears instead in bold in actual article."

I agree that it would be great if the excerpt could appear with the same formatting as the article, but I'm hoping a note will do the trick for potential buyers.