Blank Spaces
Hacking Substack for poetry
Ode to “alt-255”
left
middle
right
we
hop
skip
c r a w l
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Substack has “poetry block” function which gives you more control in formatting text but is not easily shareable. I spent a moment to hack artificial white spaces that would show up in a post without using that special block.
For line breaks, use “shift-enter”. It keeps the poem nice and tight, but it several of these will work, as in the triple jump between “hop” and “skip”.
For the blank spaces, the code in windows is “alt-255”. NB: The “255” has to be typed on a numeric keypad with “numlock” turned on.
The difficulty with this alt-code is that is that Substack does not allow you to cut and paste this character within their own Substack editor. There are two workarounds:
Write your poem in another program such as Word or Gmail and then cut-and-paste the collection into Substack. (Unfortunately this doesn’t work with the basic Windows Notepad.)
If you insist on using the Substack editor, then input several “alt-255” and then select the collection. If you hold down “alt” while dragging this selection it will copy the (blank) text instead merely moving it.
All this may be more effort than it’s worth…but it was a fun exercise for a lazy saturday morning. In this digital world, there is almost always a workaround, if you have enough time to waste!
UPDATE: Unfortunately, this hack doesn’t make the poem “Restack Quote”-able. Sorry.
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Let me test what happens if I steal part of a poem with longer lines from Journey to the West, chapter 4 (Wu Cheng’en, translated by Anthony C. Yu):
His eyes glowered strangely like burning stars.
Hanging past his shoulders were two ears, forked and hard.
His remarkable body knew many ways of change,
And his voice resounded like bells and chimes.
This BanHorsePlague with beaked mouth and gaping teeth
Aimed high to be the Equal to Heaven Sage.
UPDATE 2: It seems that “shift-enter” messes up Substack’s Restack quote function so that it grabs the wrong text. I’m gonna chalk this up as a lost cause.
But I figured out a way to avoid using that special conceptually inelegant poetry block, so I can’t complain!
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Apologies for the indulgence of posting twice today. I was inspired by this conversation between and . I just had to share as soon as I figured it out!
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Ah wow great effort! I actually had thought i might take a look at the html _after_ the post has gone out. So with a poetry block there is likely a class or tag added to the html which the app uses to identify if it can/cant be restacked... So i thought id change that and see if it unlocks the functionality
Oh thanks for the update! And like others have said on here, really wish Substack was more poetry friendly