Review text being cut off

Hi, I've been trying to post my review for Postscript - Life, Love and Loss in Australian Letters by National Library of Australia and the text keeps being cut off at the same point each time. The review is 967 words long and I've shared much longer reviews in the past without a problem.

Does anyone have any advice as to why this might be happening? It's never happened to me before.

Do you have any special characters at the point it's getting cut off? Particularly < or >?

What is the character immediately after/before the cuttoff? “Less than” maybe?

You have a special character around the place where it is cutting and it is causing the html on the page to behave weirdly.

This is my review in full:

Postscript - Life, Love and Loss in Australian Letters contains a small collection of letters from the archives held by the National Library of Australia and is just a tiny sample of the millions of letters in their extensive collection.

A variety of letters have been chosen covering a breadth of topics and were given to contemporary writers who were asked to use them as an inspiration to respond. They each did so by writing their own letter to a recipient of their choice and these were then grouped together in chapters.

In a tribute to the book I've decided to write my review in the form of a letter.

Letter to NLA
Dear National Library of Australia,

I haven't visited any of your four sites, yet I greatly admire the important work you do to preserve Australia's culture and history. I've long been a lover of letters and snail mail since I wrote in to Dolly Magazine as a teenager asking for a pen pal. I enjoyed reading your latest publication Postscript - Life, Love and Loss in Australian Letters and wanted to share my thoughts.

My favourite letter in this collection was the one from 17 year old student John Ian Wing to the Chairman of the Games Committee in charge of the 1956 Melbourne Summer Olympics. In his letter, John praises the friendliness of Melbourne people and suggests a march during the closing ceremony that is completely different to the one that took place during the opening ceremony. He proposes the athletes march as one nation, walking freely and waving to the public. In that way, John observes that 'war, politics and nationality will be all forgotten' and the whole world could be made as one nation creating 'a great occasion for everybody and no one would forget it'.

The Chairman loved the idea and John's suggestion was immediately adopted, creating a new Olympic tradition that we continue to enjoy today. I especially loved John's endearing diagram of how it could work.

Shelley Ware is an author, media presenter, educator and Mum and she was paired with this letter, choosing to write a letter to her son. In it she draws on John's vision for unity in a divided time to her son's moral compass and search for truth beyond the headlines expressed in his artwork. This was a terrific pairing and I really enjoyed it.

Another stand out was the letter from Sir John Monash in 1906 to his 13 year old daughter, narrating almost every aspect of her upcoming journey by train and then boat from Spencer Street Station (now Southern Cross Station) to the property of Canally on the Murray River.

Today you might consider his approach evidence of overparenting, but it's clear he loves her dearly and I couldn't help smiling at his advice for when she boards the boat on the Murray River:
"On settling down on the boat, I should advise you to to go bed at once, because you will, no doubt, be very tired, and the scenery is not very interesting for the first few miles. So you had better go to bed comfortably before the boat starts and do not stop up yarning, but get to sleep and tell the Stewardess to wake you quite early - say 7 a.m. - so that you can enjoy the beautiful river scenery for an hour or two before reaching Windomal." Page 26
His letter runs for pages and it made me wonder how many times he'd taken that trip but I didn't see the relevance of the two letters that followed by the late Judith Wright. While detailing the birth of her child Meredith and her subsequent recovery in hospital, I wasn't entirely sure how that related to a parent separated from their child or preparing a child for a life changing journey. However the letter from Maggie Mackellar to her adult daughter certainly embraced the spirit of the letter from Monash in her well expressed anxiety around her daughter travelling far away and the memories of her childhood the absence created.

It must have been difficult for your staff to create a longlist of letters for this project from your extensive archives. Where to start? How long did it take? I've heard from reliable sources that your staff chose letters of interest based on the identity of the sender or the recipient, the story or the writing itself. Then a generous list of potential respondents was collated, drawn from those with an existing relationship to the library, visiting writers or those who might have an interesting angle on a response.

I was pleased to see one of my favourite Australian authors included, Kate Forsyth and enjoyed her response to Jane Austen's letter. I wonder, was she able to view the original in person or online? I bet she would have been thrilled to see it.

I had fun devising my own shortlist of modern authors I'd love to see in a letter writing project like this and the fact that Postscript comes in at

Oh, it's cutting off when I post it here too!!

>2 knerd.knitter: Thank you so much! Yes! I just realise I was making reference to the fact the book was less than 130 pages using the 'less than sign' and that's what was killing my review.

>3 AnnieMod: Thanks so much Annie! I just realised I was using the 'less than' symbol and had no idea LT didn't permit usage of the symbol. All fixed now, thank you!

>7 Carpe_Librum: If you write &lt; you'll get a 'less than' symbol < that doesn't spoil the review.

>8 bnielsen: Ooooooohhhh, that's a neat trick!! Is that part of a "system" or language, the way 'less than' 'i' 'greater than'" and "'less than' '/i' 'greater than'" is part of HTML?

>9 LeslieWx: Yes, it's called HTML entities. There are lots of them but &amp; &lt; and &gt; giving & < and > are probably the ones most often used.

>9 LeslieWx: I would add to >10 bnielsen: that the ones listed there are the most important. HTML entities can be used for a lot of things, like the Greek alphabet -- if you want to include, say, the letter pi in your post, you can do it either with unicode or with HTML (so π or π -- if you check the raw HTML of this post, you'll notice that one of those is "really" a π and one is done with &pi;). But because you can use unicode for π, or for αβγδε etc. or for lots of other things, most people don't use HTML entities for those. The three @bnielsen listed are the HTML entities that really have to be done with HTML entities, because otherwise they scramble your posts.

Just as a note - we had had multiple issues through the years where LT will “assist” and replace the special notations on save. While this will work now, there is a chance that it may break a gain (and get fixed). So I prefer to say things a bit differently when I need to use special character like this one. But that’s up to you to decide for yourself. :)

>10 bnielsen: Wow, thanks so much for these and the explanation, I've learned a lot from this 'bug fix'!

>11 waltzmn: Thanks so much Waltzmn, I'm completely self taught as far as HTML goes, so I'm grateful for the lesson and the tips!

>12 AnnieMod: I agree Annie, I just re-worded my review as it was easier, but at least now I understand the reasons behind it and know how to use it in future if I need to.

Thanks everyone!

Thanks!

>7 Carpe_Librum: it's not a problem of LT but of HTML. As >8 bnielsen: said, you should use &lt; and &gt; for "less than" and "more than".

>17 .mau.: LT could do something more than just put out a single < to be misinterpreted as HTML. But that could easily bring more pain than gain :-)

(Notice that something "magic" is already happening so a single < here in talk doesn't mess up the whole thread.)

>18 bnielsen: because you wrote <, of course :-) (I wrote HTML by hand since 1994 or so, and I still do)

>19 .mau.: Yes, but it works even if I didn't :-)

Back in the old days of Talk an unclosed <i> would make the whole thread go italic. (Actually I'm getting rid of a lot of old notes / manuals / whatever from the past and looking at one of the HTML 3 notes reminded me how many different tags you could use back then. Not to mention frames and the numerous really bad browser bugs you had to navigate around.)