Please Erin, do not be offended. I know that you are very busy, so I just thought I would post this question in the open so that anyone having time could answer it so that I did not take your time.
On Chapter 1 of Lt Katia, I cut and pasted it to MS Works, straighened it out and then cut and pasted it to BCTS. It went in flawlessly and I did not have to insert any paragraphs or any thing.
So, on Chapter 2, I just used Works as my default word processor, thinking that it would post the same way. WELL, it didn't and with win 7 I no longer know how to look at file extensions, to see if there is a difference between Ch 1 and Ch 2. So, for Ch 2 I had to go through and insert line spaces through out the whole 20 pages.
I am beavering away at Ch 3 now and am wondering what I need to do to make it post as well as Ch 1?
I have the rest of tonight and tomorrow to write 15 or 20 pages, proof them and perhaps get a preliminary read done by some one before I post it. Maybe I am just pushing too hard and should get what I can done, then finish it when I come back on the 29th?
Much peace
Khadijah
Comments
You might look at my blog on MS Word
Publishing with MS Word
And the comments which follow. Every editor has features which will allow you to do a global search and replace, as well as *some* way of specifying special characters like carriage returns or linefeeds. You can insert those extra lines all at once, without going through the tedious process of inserting them all by hand one at a time.
Most editors have some method of showing "invisible" characters as well. It helps if you can see what's actually in the file rather than what the screen says.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I wonder if I should cut and paste 5 pages back to word?
I actually love Word 2007 very much, and Works has one problem which is bothersome, in that when I try to highlight the entire 25 pages, it jumps around very distractingly. Gosh, I wonder if I should just shelve the idea of posting this story until I return on the 29th?
Thank you.
Khadijah
Word & Stuff
I use Word 2007 for all my writing. I learned early on about the paragraph problem and spacing for posting here. For my drafts I always set it up for double spacing. That won't show up here. Then, out of habit, I double 'enter' at the end of a paragraph. That works perfectly for posting, and I don't have to go back later. I am learning the html stuff; however, I can go to the tool bar to do some of the things for show. Holly sent a nice little cheat sheet. I know you are close to her. Send her a note.
Portia
Portia
Personally
I have no trouble posting from Word to BCTS. I take the text from Word, post it in a programming editor (BBEdit) I have which obligingly refuses to copy any of Word's bull puckey. Then I massage the text to be what I want it to be and copy and paste from there. No problem. :)
Otherwise, I really have no advice for how to post from Word except that I would avoid it as I would a tentacular alien with gonorrhea.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I agree with your sentiments.
I have yet to have anyone complain that they can't read the documents I generate with OpenOffice, so why should I use Microsoft anything. For that matter, it's not easy to install microsoft office under Wine.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
I have to confess...
...that I use BBEdit as well, and any programmer's editor will do. There's a free version of BBEdit, BBEdit Lite, which is plenty good enough for massaging posts as Erin describes, but it runs on the Mac.
Here are a bunch more.
List of Text Editors from Wikipedia.
HTML-Kit is free for individuals and runs under Windows. I've used it quite a bit and it's hard to beat for the price, especially if you want to learn a bit about HTML so you can do fancy tricks.
Visual SlickEdit is comparable to BBEdit and is a really nice tool for Windows (and many other) operating systems, but it's pricey, designed for serious programmers with operating budgets in commercial environments. There are others like it. Each has partisans.
Open Office is free, runs under many operating systems, and has the ability to save files as plain text or HTML, which is an advantage when you post to BC, since the BC story entry page is a plain text interface which understands most HTML tags, as long as you don't try fancy tricks. That can save a lot of twiddling with those little buttons, and it's an excellent method of avoiding the need to bang your head against the wall when a long session of little button tweaking is lost in a connection failure.
If you do use the online button method, it's wise to copy and paste your work from time to time into a plain text editor in any case, so you might as well do that first.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
OpenOffice
I use openoffice to write in, but when I save as HTML it leaves all kinds of junk in.
What I do when I want to post is to open the .html file in gedit, and then use the find/replace facilities in that to heave out all the unnecessary HTML that's not wanted: all the content of the <head>...<\head> section, for example. I also strip out all font references except for titles and headings.
Save it back, and then, with the file still open on gedit, log in and select all, copy/paste into the buffer. I also have to select the "Filtered HTML w/o Line Breaks" option in the "Input format" selection underneath the input buffer. That's usually all I have to do.
Penny
I tend to do my writing on
I tend to do my writing on my Dana Wireless (which is essentially an overgrown Palm Pilot with a real keyboard and a decent sized screen). When I synch stuff to the PC I get a .doc or .rtf file.
I open that with OpenOffice and save as HTML. I then use TextPad to clean that up. OpenOfiice's HTML is merely annoying, not like the mess from Word (I don't have it, but I
ve cleand up files for posting from folks who do)
For posting to the Whateley fan-fic group over on Crystal Hall, I change things like the bold and italic tags from angle brackets to square brackets. Then a simple cut and paste fixes it.
For stuff on my own website, I just import the html into FirstPage 2000 and clean it up there, as that's what I prefer to work on web pages in.
I actually wite some stuff directly in FirstPage, but these days I do most of what little writing I manage on the bus or n bed, and the Dana is better suited to that.
Brooke brooke at shadowgard dot com
http://brooke.shadowgard.com/
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
"Lola", the Kinks
Last I looked...
...there was a "Select All" keyboard shortcut which you could also access from the menu. There shouldn't be a problem.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I save as
Word 97-2003 and copy and paste without problems, if I use Works or Word 2007, I get trouble with spacing.
Angharad
Angharad
could be
The docx thing that word became with 2007 and I would guess beyond. I know I had to download a little addon to be able to read with my older version. Using Open Office though it just seems to handle it and the recent things *cough* I've posted were done using OO without any drama. I almost always had to do some post err post tweaking with Word.
Kris
Win7 and extensions
Actually, it's not that hard to show file extensions in Win7. Just open any Explorer window, click "Organize", "Folder and Search Options" and "View" -- the options tab is almost identical to the old one in XP, so you should be able to take it from here.
There's also a desktop gadget (it probably works in Vista's Sidebar too) that will turn on / turn off displaying file extensions and, hidden files and super-hidden (what Windows call "system protected") files with a single click. You can find it here: http://windows7gadgets.net/gadgets/system/toggle-hidden-file...
One of the best free editors for Windows
In my humble opinion, the best text editor for Windows is Notapad++. And the best feature - for me at least - is the fact that it is free. I have been using it for a lot of conversions (e.g. Win to *nix to Mac and vice versa or to/from UTF). It also has a very powerfull search/replace feature including regular expresions, that allows you to do some pretty fancy stuff with your text.
Jessica
You have to make sure in
You have to make sure in Word that you change the default Spacing rules.
By Default word 2007 sets the spacing to 0 pt before and 10pt after. All well and good if you are actually going to print from word, but when you copy that into the BCTS editor, it loses the line spacing after, because that is not being done with a carriage return, but rather with the formatting tool.
So set your line spacing to 0 pt before, 0 pt after and then you will see it the same way that it will post in BCTS, and you can add the carriage returns normally.
Not true
At least, not for me.
I actually have to set OpenOffice to 0-before/10-after paragraph spacing in order to get an impression of what it will look like when it is published.
When a story from BCTS is displayed in HTML, at least in Firefox, every paragraph that is enclosed by <p>...</p> results in a displayed text block that is separated from the next by a noticeable gap. It is therefore not necessary to put extra carriage returns between paragraphs - except for specific purposes.
If you are discussing spacing between lines within paragraphs, I have never found it necessary to change the defaults.
Penny
True
Within certain limitations, valid HTML BODY content works properly if pasted into the edit window. You can't use stylesheets safely, and should avoid HTML headers and footers, since they will confuse the parser, but simple HTML is perfectly appropriate.
On the other hand, most people probably don't want to learn HTML. That's why the edit window and all those little buttons exist. They generate HTML, but one doesn't really have to know why or how they work.
Call it the Wizard of Oz effect.
Cheers,
Puddin'
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! The Great Oz has spoken!
--- The Wizard of Oz
I can't come back! I don't know how it works! [waving to the crowd] Good-bye, folks!
--- The Wizard of Oz
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style