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I am about to begin a new story and have a dilemma. I write my story using MS Word with Times New Roman 12 point font. When I copy and paste it into BCTS it changes it to a Cambria 13.5 point font. It also requires me to add italics and some other forms of punctuation that do not transfer correctly.
Is there a way I can just upload each chapter as a document?
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uploading documents
Not a Word document, not safe. You could upload PDF, TXT, RTF or EPUB.
Down below the editing box there is an area for doing file uploads. Yoou'll still have to have some minimum content in the editing box, though. And your readers will have to download the files to read your stuff which generally kills all commenting and kudos because they would have to go back to the site to add them.
Also, BTW, Times New Roman is a newspaper font. Looks crappy on screen.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
If I could add
In many respects it doesn't matter what typeface and point size you choose to write in. Use whatever is most comfortable for you.
What you have to appreciate is that you have little or no control over how your text will be displayed by the reader. For example, my own systems exclusively run Linux and therefore I do not have Times New Roman available since it is copyright by Microsoft and not available to other operating systems.
Others are maybe reading your opus on laptops, tablets or phones which are probably not running Windows but Android, iOS or Chrome to name but a few, so the same thing applies. In addition, the screens and resolutions available will almost certainly be different to yours. Not to mention the small matter of those who need accommodations due to poor eyesight, etc. Solution: an agnostic system which permits the reader to see the text in a way that is comfortable for their own preferences. This is called HTML and is what your browser uses.
Ultimately, what you send to BC should just be text and very little else. The system will happily cope with that. Since most writers don't use Notepad the system is also designed to cope with a limited variety of known formats, MS Word (various versions) being one.
Personally I use LibreOffice - a version of OpenOffice - but I select HTML as my file type when I save. This allows me to write in a 'displayable' format, put in italics and, very occasionally, insert graphics and such. I don't use much else in the way of formatting. Once I have finished I do open the file in an equivalent of Notepad to make sure it is clean, since LibreOffice and its antecedants have a tendency to get confused with the minor points of HTML but I think BC clears most of the cruft out anyway. The result shouldn't be affected.
You can test the resulting file by simply selecting it in File Manager and then dragging and dropping it onto your browser window. You can then see - roughly - what the reader would see, though of course without all the BC bells and whistles surrounding it. Useful for making sure all your formatting is correct.
A side benefit of this is that the files are much smaller. Try saving something in MS Word as a Word document and then as HTML and notice the size difference! Word has a tendency to micromanage everything and this causes file bloat.
Don't attempt to impose your writing preferences on your readers. You have no idea what they are reading on, no idea what fonts they have available, no idea what size or shape their screen is, no idea even what character set they are using. Special characters which look OK to you may just come out as a weird jumble of dingbats to them. The best strategy is to keep things as simple as possible, that way you'll satisfy the largest number of readers.
Penny
Timse New Roman is from Monotype Corporation
Times New Roman was licensed by Microsoft from The Monotype Corporation, which designed the typeface in 1931-32 for the London Times, which used it until 1972. Microsoft does not own the copyright.
The Wikipedia article on the subject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman lists some free typefaces which are compatible, including two which are distributed under the GNU General Public License and are available to Linux users. Of course, this does not address the needs of iOS, Android, etc. users, so your recommendation to use ordinary html is still a good one. I also agree that Microsoft Word generates very cluttered html files, with a lot of data only useful for Word and not for a browser.
Ok, as others have noted,
Ok, as others have noted, Word is a bad choice. It breaks several standards regarding HTML documents.
For one, MS's "smartquotes" are illegal characters in the characters set *defined* as the default character set for HTML.
A list of those characters is at http://shadow.shadowgard.com/chartest/windows-1252.html
also, while you can turn off "smart quotes" in Word, wordpad, etc anything you've already written will have them and it's a major pain to remove them.
If you are using Word, *first* you have to dig into the menus to find out how to turn off smart quote. Then you have to write things from scratch as importing text from previous documents will important the "smart quote" characters too.
Next, you aren't *supposed* to use fixed font sizes in HTML. You can use relative font sizes, but not absolute. That's so that the text will properly reformat for people whose default font setting is different than yours. People who have poor vision, for example.
If you are writing in Word, or better yet OpenOffice or Libre-Office, you need to save as HTML.
Then you need to use a text editor (notepad will work, but something like TextPad is much easier to work with for this).
You use the text editor to strip out all the garbage that the word processor added. As an example, all three of those word processors will include the font size, style, and type at the start of every single paragraph.
Word includes even more junk HTML than the others. Editing a Word doc saved as HTML to "proper" HTML with result in a file that's less than 30% of the size of the original file. It'll not only load faster, but it's more likely to display ok on most browsers.
The only tags you really need for a story here are things like bold, italic, underline and a few others. hr for dividers, maybe some others.
I can show you what something looks like before and after stripping out the junk.
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
Well, almost
I have found that OpenOffice Writer and LibreOffice Writer can do the right thing if you train them well.
I have a cleaned-up template for the top of my story chapters which I "Save As" for each new chapter. If I then write into that file it comes out mostly clean. I don't tend to find the font size, style and type at the beginning of each chapter unless I've been doing something unusual, and then it is only the changed sections.
There are two things I would report about LibreOffice: firstly, it gets absolute color codes confused. If I edit the file to set a title color as "#903" it will subsequently be saved as "#903000". It's a number, for Goddess sake, it should be saved as "#000903". Slight difference. Even if I specify it as "#000903" it will strip the leading zeroes on loading and insert trailing zeroes on saving. Sigh. That one is easy enough to catch and change just before I post.
The second thing is that if you are editing text which includes italics it can get very confused, with attempts to cancel non-existent font settings followed by setting the exact same font settings, sometimes wrapping the text in unnecessary span blocks which I then have to kill. Usually, though it behaves itself.
Even so, I reckon the effort I expend fixing these files is much less than I would for MS Word. For that I would probably need a chair and a whip.
Penny
Color codes
To convert three digit color codes to six digit codes: #903 becomes #900030. Some browsers will auto-corrupt three digit codes, so I always try to use the six digit versions.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Frankly, given the variance
Frankly, given the variance in monitor settings (and monitors themselves) I don't try for "subtle" colors. Because they may come out differently.
Also, one might try the HTML color *names*
http://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_names.asp
It's much harder for the word processor to mangle those. Well, it *should* be anyway.
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
LOTS of Info
OK. My brain is near bursting and please understand that I am sooooo blonde.
I am writing my stories in the hope of self-publishing them on Amazon. I have an author who has graciously allowed me the use of her own MS Word template that is compatible with Amazon's self-publishing service. She has over 30 published novels and has spent years perfecting the template. It requires a 12 pt TNR font.
What I have been doing is writing my chapters in Word, copying them into BCTS then inserting the HTML code for bold/italics/underline. I also have to create a break between paragraphs. I also reread it as a final draft check for errors, then save it here.
After saving it, I copy the saved text and paste it back into a new Word document. This gives me two saved drafts.
Be kind to those who are unkind, tolerant toward those who treat you with intolerance, loving to those who withhold their love, and always smile through the pains of life.
For paragraphs, just use the
For paragraphs, just use the HTML paragraph tag.
Put a <p> at the start of the paragraph and a </p> at the end.
Me, I save things as rtf files, both because they are more portable and because that's what the word processor files on my Dana Wireless get converted to when imported onto the PC.
As noted, I'll do a save as HTML from Open Office, then clean up the junk in textpad. I then save result and make the extension .html.txt. That lets me know it's a file for posting on BC or other sites.
For some sites I need to replace all the < > with [ ] (Crystal Hall, for example) But that's a fairly simple edit, and I don't save the file that way, I just make the edit then do a copy and paste from it to the edit window on the site.
I could email you the .html.txt file for one of my posted stories here so you can see what's what. I could even send you the RTF file (or better, the unedited .html file) so you could see the differences.
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
HTML
I can save files as rtf, doc, txt, docx, and pdf from Word. I just don't have any idea how to make Word change it to HTML.
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
TIME by Pink Floyd
Be kind to those who are unkind, tolerant toward those who treat you with intolerance, loving to those who withhold their love, and always smile through the pains of life.
I don't have a copy of Word
I don't have a copy of Word handy, but a quick google found this:
To convert a MS Word document into HTML:
Open the Word document in Microsoft Word.
Click File or the Office button (depending on your version of Word).
Choose Save As.
Under the Save As type drop-down menu, choose Web Page, Filtered.
Under Save In, select the folder where you would like to save the file.
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
Uploading to Amazon is a doddle
Amazon is geared to MS Word so uploading is automatically done.
It's uploading to BC that's a problem. I simply press Enter twice for paragraph breaks, and use copy and paste to enter in BC.
Like you, I have a problem with italics etc. For the font, I use the standard BC font, although it's easy to change by selecting all before making the change.