My formatting looks off. Please Help

[victorianlace22]

Hi everyone!  Could someone please help with the way my description looks?  The formatting looks off.  I don't know what I did, but none of my other descriptions look so lopsided.  At first it was going off the page and it looked terrible on the cellphone (I originally did it on the laptop), so I kind of moved it to the left and it still looks lopsided.  I want to fix it before I get a bid.  Thank you!  This one https://www.ebay.com/itm/256102088712  

[44012]

Hello, I looked at a few but they look ok. One looks a little long but nothing looks really lopsided to me anyway. I hope this helps.

[victorianlace22]

Thank you for looking.  Do you know why that one doesn't look like the other ones and why it originally went off the page?  

[44012]

Hi, oops. Yes, your formatting is off. I have had this happen and had to delete the content or the body then make sure the centering was all the way to the left then retyped. I think I personally had a problem with cut and past so  I had to delete first and start over in my case as it kept staying in the middle.

[victorianlace22]

Now that you mention it, I did copy and paste because I had originally done the description in wordpad.  Oh brother how to fix this now lol  

[44012]

I know this sounds crazy but perhaps maintenance the listing to see if you can remove everything. Make sure the alignment is set to the left. Then end the listing and sell similar. Then retype in manually. I have had a lot of problems with fonts, spacing, bold from cut and pasting and not being able to maintenance the listing in ebay when it appears all messed up. I usually clear everything out and start over because it doesn't always seem like ebay accepts the programming. I hope this helps. I don't think it is something you can't fix.

[victorianlace22]

I'm scared to delete it because it has 10 watchers already and I just put it up last night.  Figures I would screw up the auction that meant a lot to me LOL  I never do it in wordpad either but I wanted everything to be just right with the sizes, etc  I should have done it in drafts.  

[44012 · Accepted solution]

I'm sure you can fix it. Try to revise but before your do cut and paste to word so you don't lose anything (text content). Then go back to your listing description, clear it all out.  Make sure all the little font tabs are not active and are just defaulted. Then retype a little bit manually and see if it works. If it doesn't work, don't save the revision, and go back to the old listing and use it. Honestly, it is a really nice item and I am not sure that the centering is going to force anyone to look away.  I am sure you are going to get many watchers on this item as well so imho even if you fixed and sold similar after the fix those watchers would come right back. I wish you luck!

[victorianlace22]

It worked!  Thank you so much!  I did select all to clear it all out.  Before I was just highlighting the text and deleting it.  Select all must have really cleared out everything.  Then I typed it all out by hand instead of pasting.  Thank you again!  

[retro_entertainment_collectibles]

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@victorianlace22 wrote:

I'm scared to delete it because it has 10 watchers already and I just put it up last night.  Figures I would screw up the auction that meant a lot to me LOL  I never do it in wordpad either but I wanted everything to be just right with the sizes, etc  I should have done it in drafts.  

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Wordpad tends insert formatting that when cutting/pasting back into a web TextBox fouls things up as the web browser you're using tries interpret Wordpad formatting.  Same can happen when for example your cutting/pasting content from some other website.  Paste it into a TextBox and the formatting comes right with it which can be a good thing or a bad thing.

Best way to cut/paste when you want strip any formatting from the content you've copied or cut is by using a programmers editor.  No, dont be scared LOL!  They are just like any other text editor  with hosts of features slated towards programmers.  The difference is when you paste into a programmers editor such as Notepad++ which is free online it will automagically strip any formatting.  Then when you cut/copy or paste from it to a TextBox online all formatting is gone.

Now to the problem at hand if you edit you're listing description you'll see a link saying "Show All Options" Click it and a dialog box will pop up confirming.  After confirming you'll see an online editor pop up.  You can try highlighting the text thats shifted over and you should see on the formatting buttons above that it all shows "Centered," simply use the shift to left margin button which ought correct it.

If it doesn't then you need check the box that says "Show HTML" which is the actual web page content, HTML means "Hypertext Markup Language" which is basically a computer language that the web browser understands.  There is some markup right after the ":" colon that says <Table Align=Center> and that's whats forcing the text to center.  If you remove the "Center" portion or replace it with "Left" it'll correct.

[victorianlace22]

I had tried selecting the text, putting it in the center, then putting it to the left.  It didn't work.  It's fixed now though with the select all and deleting the text.  That must have cleared out anything that was making it look off.  Thank you for your help!