General

These are notes from 20 March 2024.  I've seen older documents, some even published in Wattpad, that talk about doing things that don't appear to be currently possible.  This may change in the future, so these notes may change.  Comments welcome.

Sometimes Wattpad will appear to allow you to paste formatted text in, but then change it when you publish.  If you're doing anything other than standard formatting, make sure you use Preview to see what it'll actually look like.

Formatting

Formatting text in Wattpad seems to be limited to bold, italics and underline, with combinations possible.  Formatting can be done by highlighting text, which gives a control bar for formatting, or by toggling formatting using ctrl-b for bold, ctrl-i for italics and ctrl-u for underline.

In the web interface, newlines are automatically doublespaced with no indentation.  Copying and pasting singlespaced text from Windows NotePad results in the text all placed on a single line after publishing.  The Wattpad Android app doesn't doublespace.

Using Enter starts a new paragraph.  Individual paragraphs can be commented on by readers.  You can chain paragraphs together to effectively make a larger paragraph by starting a line with a hyphen "-".
- so that this is considered one big paragraph.

It's possible to justify text by highlighting and using the control bar, with left-justify the default, and

right-justify

and center-justify

available.

HTML

Wattpad doesn't recognize HTML.  Tags are considered text; <b>bold tags</b>, for example, don't work.  There are guides, even published on Wattpad, that talk about using HTML in Wattpad; it's possible HTML was once allowed, but it isn't currently, at least not at the free level.

Bulleted Lists

Bulleted lists are not a formatting option in Wattpad.  Copying and pasting a bulleted list from a Google Doc or Windows WordPad results in a bunch of doublespaced left-justified lines with no bullets.  Copying and pasting a bulleted list from Windows Notepad does work, but you need to make your own ASCII bullets.  This is done on a Windows PC by turning off NumLock and typing 0149 while holding down Alt.  Indenting in the bullet list has to be done manually with spaces, and after the copy/paste has been done. 

Bullet list

• test

• test 2

  • subtest 2a

If the bullet list is single-spaced in NotePad, it will appear in Wattpad as a single line after publishing, so line breaks will need to be added.

Straight from NotePad:

Bullet list• test• test 2 • subtest 2a

Unicode Characters

Unicode characters can't be typed into Wattpad, but they can be copied and pasted from other documents.  On a Windows PC they can be typed in WordPad (but not NotePad) by typing the Unicode hex value for the character and then pressing alt-x.  So the bullet list above can be formatted with different kinds of bullets:

Bullet list

• test

• test 2

  ▪ subtest 2a

   ○ subtest 2b

● test 3

25CF: ●

25CB: ○

25A0: ■

25A1: □

Strikethrough

Strikethrough is not a formatting option in Wattpad.  Copying and pasting strikethrough-ed text from Google Docs or Windows WordPad doesn't work.  However, there are web-based strikethrough text generators that can produce text to copy/paste.  Googling "strikethrough" should bring up one or more.

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