I decided to do a simple Copy/Paste to Word of each of my stories, and print them all. I'm not sure where I will go from there. I don't have a pressing reason for doing this, though I suspect that one or more of my Electronic Hard Drives is on the verge or has packed it in. In Big Closet Top Shelf, it 'looks' like I can copy, but I don't seem able to paste these files, or any of them to my Word. I don't know what it would cost to have it all bound, and I have no idea what page size I would use. I suspect that 9 x 5 3/4 would be nice eventually but for now I will likely just do 8 1/2 x 11. There is probably a simple solution to all this, but it is well known that that I am not a Technophile. I want to do it in dead tree, not Kindle.
Gwen
Comments
You can cut/paste
IF... if you go into and edit the story. Then you can select the text of the story and paste it into a new document. I sometimes do just that when I am in the middle of posting a story and I see an error. I'll correct the text in the edit box, select it all (Ctrl/A) and copy (Ctrl/C) (If you are on a Mac then replace 'Ctrl' with 'Command'.
Then go to a new word document and paste it into that document.
I hope this helps
Samantha
I used to do this
When making a copy of stories I wanted to save. First I set up a blank document in Word with the margins, etc. I wanted. Then I went to the story I wanted, and selected the print-friendly version. This removes much of the formating imposed by drupal. Select all, then copy. Opened the blank doc in Word and pasted. Note: you will then have to go through the new Word file and add most of the formating, it will not pop up looking all pretty. Then there's your story.
Tips: set the margins narrow enough to allow for punching holes for your binder. You will need to restore the line and paragraph spacing. You may have to reconnect lines of text should there be an errant CRLF in the middle of the page. Enable spell check, if you have it. This is your golden opportunity to fix all those nagging screwups. Save frequently, being sure to make each save a new name so you know where you are at. Start saving with the first copy/paste. That would be XYZ1.(file format). The next save would be XYZ2.xxx, and so on.
This is fairly labor intensive. I'm sure that somebody will popup with a better, easier method. But at the time I was doing it this worked for me, so it does have that going for it.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
copy/paste
it sounds like this is so complicated. i just open a story to read it. then start the curser wherever i want it to start, left click and hold to start the highlight, then scroll down to the end. hit copy. then i go to an opened notepad doc. notepad is included free in the windows program if you cant afford office, or you can use open office which is like an older version of an expensive ms/office. set the curser at where you want to start and right click to get paste. you can then save as a text doc and read it in whatever font and size you prefer. times new roman 12 point gives a very readable set. you can fancy it up as you read and then save any changes. you can leave it as a notepad text doc. or have it open in wordpad which is part of windows also.you may have to dink around a bit to get it in your desired font, but its easy. you can then open the doc and add part 2 through whenever and it will prompt to save changes. then just rename the doc. note pad and word pad were the ms word processors before they started marketing the office programs with all the bells and whistles. been doing this since 3 1/2 inch discs were standard, up through the superdisc and the jazz drives and then thumbdrives now the little cards. i have a tablet i use that runs on google, which i detest, and it wont open some of the wordpad docs as they are rich text, but it opens plain text just fine.(notepad) i have no idea on a linux boxen, or an apple unit.
I read a lot at fanfiction.net cause its free stuff also. you can't just highlight and copy paste there. so i started using ctrl s to just save the page. i save it as simple text and can then go about copy/paste multi chaps into one doc and save as plain simple text.
Curser and Cursor
a "Curser" is someone who has lost lots of important work when the Lord Microsoft decides it is time to apply a load of patches/updates
"Cursor" OTOH is that little blinky thing that tells us where we are when doing so many things on computers these days. AFAIK, they date from the time of IBM 3270 type block mode terminals (those of us in our dotage will remember the green screens.
Now onto the subject of the thread.
AFAIK, Notepad does not handle line endings very well. It is (or was) very crude.
OTOH, Wordpad does handle word wraps very well.
Libre Office is a very good replacement for the increasingly expensive and complicated MS Orifice or nowadays, an Orifice 365 subscription.
Yes, you can buy standalone Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc) but functions like 'Autosave' require you to login to you MS account and those saved docs are stored in the cloud... one more way to get you to buy Orifice 365 (or given the downtime already this year, Orifice 350).
Libre Office is as the name suggests, 'Free' although they do welcome the odd shekel or three as a donation.
Open Office is another free alternative to the walled citadel that MS has built.
Samantha
doh
i knew that. i will blame either the nasty spell check substitution when i wasn't looking, or being asleep when i wrote it at zero dark thirty.
Better way
* Go to the title page of story if it's a serial, or simply open story if it's a standalone.
* Top right of page, click on Printer-friendly version
* In file menu, print or export file to PDF
* Select where you want the PDF file to reside on your computer, click enter, DONE
* If you want it in Word open the PDF in Word and convert to Doc or DocX extension depending on how old your Word program is.
Computer Suddenly Has Troubles
Now, the Computer is not connecting with the printer. I'll have to work that out.
First-est ... Get a couple of USB "thumb drives" ("disks") ...
... and copy all that you can to them. Microsoft Windows will "see" the USB as 'just another disk drive'.
You can copy single files, entire folders, or even all of your precious stuff to them, without out much pain.
One thing that may help, is to go into a Big computer store and say "Help!". Many will want to sell you something. (In USA, the 'Big store' is Best Buy. I've never felt them "pushing". They get me to right part of store, and answer questions, then leave me alone until checkout.)
Twice a week, I use Windows "File Explorer" to copy all of my "goodies" to a USB-attached hard drive, each day's backup named "2023-02-018", 2023-02-19, etc. (Hard drives are more expensive, but start at holding 1 Trillion characters (1,000,000,000.000) - around ten times what a reasonable USB can. I don't use any kind of 'backup' software - they have a learning curve, they're fragile, a 'p.i.t.a' to use, and they 'lock you in'.)
(On my 'shopping list" - some "big" USBs.)
I'm not sure of exact statistics, but even the longest (Angharad!, Teddie S,) serials here come to perhaps 5-10 million words, or 50-100 million characters. (Average English word comes to about 5 letters/characters/bytes, I used 10 for ease of math.)
A "middle of the road" USB will hold a thousand times as much. (50-100 gigabytes, or 32, 64, 128, "Gig"...) (For tech-blather reasons, USB makers like powers of two.)
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(As others have said) Much >good, free< software is at https://portableapps.com/. Start with the menu system, then add what you want. Undelete is easy, worst case, delete the directory/ies. Portable Apps are built to >not< leave "tracks" on your computer. The LibreOfffice word processor - I've used that for a decade+.
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Just in case (and with computers prefixes can mean a power of two, or 10, sigh. The box should clarify.)
Kilo - 1,000
Mega - 1,000,000
Giga - 1,000,000,000 (billions)
Tera - 1,000,000,000,000 (trillions)
Next higher prefix - Wikipedia.
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After all the above - others have given good how-tos on actually copying your stuff from BCTS to your computer.
But ... backups of your machine first.
I have this flash drive
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sandisk-ultra-fit-512gb-usb-3-1...
It's permanently installed in a USB port and every day that I write anything, I run a back up of my documents folder. It only takes a few minutes and the drive came with the software to do it preinstalled.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
The key point is 'a couple'
Never trust your data to one only one USB drive. They are not the most reliable of devices.
Windows is a PITA when it comes to backups. Always has been hence the plethora of backup software packages on the market.
If you use MacOS then you have the luxury of 'Time Machine' built into the OS. Even then, I don't rely on it alone. I backup my work to another SSD every other day. Takes less than a minute.
Samantha
Backups
I send regular zip files of the active Scrivener project folder via email to a friend for off-site storage, as well as to a USB. And Scrivener automatically backs up the project to a separate hard drive in the computer. I did have Office Depot print out two copies each of my four books a couple months ago, which was kinda costly.
Firefox add-on GrabMyBooks
I use the Firefox add-on "GrabMyBooks" to capture the story to save it in ePub format. Unfortunately the current version does not work to capture multiple links at once. This add-on has allowed me to save my favorite stories for off-line reading on my tablet or smartphone.
And with the open source tools available with Linux I can even edit the formatting.
Also bear in mind that the ePub file is actually a ZIP-file that you can uncompress with any file compression utility. And the text is contained as xhtml plain text files.
I don't have any problem with Copy/Paste
I just updated my word "Bru Book" with the stories I have posted here (as posted) without any problem using copy/paste.
For those of you who think I write too short stories; the combined tally actually is 125 341 words (probably slightly overstated due to some things counted as words that aren't).
Of course, if I finish my Death in Venice Beach story (which appears to head towards >20 000 words rather than the 100 000 I once threatened you with) then the tally will change significantly. At present I have more pressing things to do though.