Primal Book One - Technical questions.

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Need some help.

As you may have noticed, the remainder of PRIMAL has been posted.

I am afraid that a lot of formatting has been lost as the source files are Microsoft Word, and it doesn't translate very well to the cut and paste style for posting stories.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to go about turning content in a .DOCX file into something that is usable by the story posting system, please let me know.

Thanks.

Comments

Attach files

erin's picture

The system is designed so files in other formats can be attached. You can see the File Attachment section on the Add Fiction page down below the text entry box. Such files can preserve formatting so that readers can download the file and read it using the appropriate software. Word can produce RTF files and free tools like Caliber can produce EPUB files for attachment. Doc(x) files are not allowed to be attached because of the higher risk of hidden malware in such files. (Yes, I know other filetypes can have hidden malware but the risk is lower because native MsWord files are such a big target.)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Option

Daphne Xu's picture

Does Microsoft Word have the option to save files in .html format? If so, use that.

-- Daphne Xu

Yes, MSWord does have an HTML option.

Patricia Marie Allen's picture

However, it also has it's own problems. It puts several pages of meta junk that is unnecessary and would need to be edited out. Plus it presumes a type size that comes out in fly speck size, when opened with a browser.

Older versions of Word had a more generic HTML option that would have been better. When I was posting to my own web page, I used it with some success. The current version, like a lot of other "modern" software thinks we're dumb enough not to know what we want.

Hugs
Patricia

Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt

I totally agree

Please avoid the HTML output type from MS-Office like the plague. The output is an abomination that MS should be totally ashamed of but they simply don't care.
I saw these words about their appaling service the other day.


Another Day
Another MS Outage
How long will it last?
As we fondly remember the past
When rebooting the fileserver
took only a minute or two
but now oh, what are we to do?
while we wait and wait
to learn our fate
while MS just laughs
all the way to the bank.


The old fileservers didn't

The old fileservers didn't boot that fast either, at least not Microsofts. I remember an Exchange server in 1998 that took 45 minutes to reboot.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Boot times are dependant on the OS

If the Fileserver is Linux then it should come up again within a minute or two.
Back in 1994 we could failover a whole Oracle instance in 30 seconds on Unix.
But yes exchange is a total dog and 45 minutes is fast for a reboot.

If Exchange ever took 45 minutes to boot....

then there was something wrong, the machine had crash and the EDB files were in a dirty state, or you were running a bare OS minimum requirement configuration.

Shutting down would take some time, but I found that they went down faster if you ran a batch file to shut down the Exchange services in reverse order, instead of allowing them to deadlock and get killed by the OS.

That was NT 4.0 and Exchange

That was NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5. It was very much properly configured. It was just an absolute piece of trash about going down and coming back up - and it wanted it at least once a week - of course, right in the middle of the work day.

I can generally get a more modern exchange server to reboot in about 15 minutes, as long as I manually take down the exchange services. Most of that time is Dell playing with itself with all the server and RAID checks. If I don't take down the exchange services manually, the entire server will lock halfway down, and have to be physically rebooted on site.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

MS Word HTML

Yes, there is an option for HTML, but once the HTML file is created, I still have to do a copy and paste into the BCTS editor, and all the formatting goes poof.

Change text format

erin's picture

If you are pasting your own HTML, you need to use a different Text format than Filtered HTML. There is a Full HTML option that I can give you access to if you need it, It isn't default because using Full HTML can mess up the whole website if used by someone who does not know what they are doing.

But DO NOT USE MsWord/Office-created HTML because that stuff is so Krufty it ought to have a red nose and a fright wig.

Hugs,
Erin

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Krufty HTML

No, I don't think I want to bypass any safeguards you might have in place to keep the site safe. If I post more of my work, I'll use either plain text and chop and paste, or do the file upload in RTF or PDF formats.