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I've put a few stories up here and I'm wondering if there is an easier way than my current process.
I write my stories in LibreOffice and my first thought was to convert it html but it added a ton of extra code (mostly font/paragraph stuff that isn't needed) and I didn't like how it looked so I decided to copy-paste it instead. This leads to a ton of extra work to add blank lines and fix my formatting.
Does anyone else have a better system? Does anyone use software that does a better job converting to html?
Check your default "AUTOMAGIC" settings.
The most potent source of paragraph division errors lies in WP programmes that "insert" a fat bottom margin on the display whenever they see a carriage return, but don't make any change in the file. So the WP file *looks* like it has an extra carriage return between paragraphs but actually doesn't. MS Word is notoriously stupid, but programmes which imitate it for the sake of "compatibility" act just as silly unless you tell them not to do so. On the other hand, MS Word's default behaviour is wonderful when you want to check and see whether you've accidentally added an extraneous carriage return (or linefeed – whatever character or sequence of characters your system uses) that just happens to fall on the right margin.
I have a blog on the subject laying about.
There are also supposedly useful online tools laying about:
http://word2cleanhtml.com/
http://www.textfixer.com/html/convert-word-to-html.php
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1596911/how-do-you-convert-a-word-document-into-very-simple-html-in-python
As mentioned on this last page, the best conversion is probably done by GoogleDocs
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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 found your blog post
http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/blog/18372/publishing-with-mic...
This plus all the other advice gives me a few ideas when I go to publish my next story. Thanks for the help!
What I do (may not be the best!)
is I write the story in Open Office.
Then I have set up a template so that the headings on all my episodes are the same, I just have to change the title and the intro blurb.
I copy and paste the finally approved story into the right place in my template and fill out the variables (title, intro). This template has all the HTML code required.
Then I save that as a doc - and copy and paste this entirety into BC.
Takes me at the most 5 minutes.
PM if you want more details.
Cheers
Julia
Well, as someone who's done
Well, as someone who's done some web design in the past, I tend to consider layout as I'm writing, and I would write in a text editor.
I would code my <em>'s and such right into the text.
Then paste it into libreoffice for a spellcheck, and then into the edit box on the site.
I'm not saying that'll work for you, but if you can handle layout manually as you go, it's a possibility.
I use BBEdit, a programmer's editor...
...and it allows spelling checks which ignore the code, so you don't get trapped in endless hiccoughs after swallowing every bit of HTML. It's only fault is that - if one uses words with embedded numeric or mnemonic encodings of non-ASCII characters, it does tend to trip over them.
It also does spellcheck as you type, highlighting the questionable word with red underlining, so it's slightly more difficult to make mistakes if one glances up at the screen every once in a while.
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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 just use Word
And they think I am dumb for it. All you have to do is add an extra carriage return for every para.
As for the fancy things, I either get someone to do it for me, or I study HTML until I can make it work.
:)
I have a very useful addon
I have a very useful addon for firefox that turns the input boxes into a word-like text editor. It's called Write-Area. You can activate it with a right-click on the writing box once you've downloaded it and then you simply need to copy the text from your text editor into the window.
(It may still fuck up your editing, but then you can simply change the Format from Normal to Normal (DIV). That always solved the issues for me.