This morning at 1:00 AM I finished a short story, complete with the extra spaces between paragraphs that Drupal requires. As far as I was concerned, it was ready to publish.
This morning I got up and decided to give it one last read to check for continuity. Much to my discomfiture, all those blooming extra carriage returns are gone! Can I have not remembered correctly? Did I forget to save my work? I am quite certain that I saved it and I have auto save set at 5 minutes.
So, now I must go searching for a Microsoft booby trap that perhaps does some sort of auto format. Perhaps if said functon exists, I can disable it?
I have never used this Toshiba lap top to write with, and I wonder if some sort of memory deficency causes it to make mistakes? Maybe the same could be said of myself?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Gwendolyn
Comments
What can I tell you?
I too use Word, the 2008 edition, and have found mondo-bizarro behavior like this is sometimes par for the course. It's not your computer that is out to get you, it's just MSWord. :)
BTW, I only use Word for preparing things for printing. It creates lousy HTML for webpages.
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.
Word processors and HTML
In my experience, most word manglers (including Google Docs) create a lousy job of HTML - many seem to have the paranoid idea that the web page must resemble precisely what you see on screen, with everything placed exact fractions of an inch away from each other. And, indeed, the result may look fine on your screen. But on anyone with a different sized monitor / different default text size etc., it'll look horrible. HTML != DTP.
There's also added fun in that most nowadays try to use css to describe every aspect of presentation. Which would be fine if you were posting a full web page, not so fine if you're pasting HTML into a memo field (multi line text) in a CMS. To make matters worse, they often combine styles, which makes it hard to find / replace with the HTML 4 equivalent (been there, done that, bought the proverbial T shirt numerous times...).
-oOo-
Regarding the line break issue, two things you can try: first of all, turn on formatting marks - hopefully, every hit of the Enter key should show up as ¶. If there only appears to be one, try using Find / Replace to find paragraph marks and replace with two. Or (more sneakily), find and replace with <p> - the HTML paragraph identifier (as opposed to <br> - line break - equivalent to shift + enter).
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
more modern html
HTML these days wants closing tags too. That 'find and replace' should be "</p><p>". Then you just need a starting <p> up top, and a closing </p> at the end of the file, and all your paragraphs are proper paragraphs.
Auto correct options
You might want to check the Auto-correct options in your word processor. Most word processor applications have options enabled that will remove white-spaces at the start and end of paragraphs, They also have options to remove blank/empty paragraphs. Meaning that every time you hit the Enter key, you create a paragraph. So if you hit Enter twice at the end of a paragraph, that extra/empty paragraph gets removed by autocorrect.
You can use Search and Replace to replace every paragraph marker with 2 paragraph markers. Though I do not know the exact code to use in MS-Word, since I use LibreOffice for my text processing.
Hope this helps in the future.
Jessica
MS Word Special Formatting Characters
In MS Word you need to replace ^p with ^p^p. ^p is paragraph and ^t is tab.
Michelle B
Having an issue with MS Word 2010.
Well, when I post, the paragraphs as automatically spaced, same with sentences.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
SeaMonkey.
No, seriously, SeaMonkey is the bit of the Mozilla project that still builds the entire thing - web browser (aka FireFox), mail reader (aka Thunderbird), but the web editor in it is one of the better free ones. It has four modes - "Normal" (which looks mostly like a word processor), "HTML Tags" (which is like normal but it shows some of the HTML tags), "<HTML> Source", which allows you to edit the source directly, and "Preview" (which renders as per a browser, but you can't edit anything.) I write my stuff in "Normal", flipping to "<HTML> Source" as required - unlike most other editors, it copes quite well with unusual (but valid) HTML and preserving it when you flip back to "Normal" mode.
Then when you want to paste it to BCTS, just flip to source view and paste from there.
Paragraph setting?
I don't know 2010, but in 2007, there is a space-after-paragraph setting which can be easily reset for the whole document by Selecting All and then changing.
The problem is that I don't believe this is any good for submissions here - you actually need to enter two ENTER characters sequentially to leave a complete line space. You could do a Find and Replace, to replace one ENTER with two, then Replace All, and tidy up a bit afterwards.