eFiction Storyposting and Why I haz a sad with it

[Hylas]

Why is it that posting text into the textboxes in eFiction from Word more often than not results in a thorough mangling?

 

Common problems:

 

1) When pasting from a word document with automatic paragraph spacing of 1 line, eFiction monster decides to double the spacing. Unfortunately it artificially inflates the body of the text in doing so. Single-line dialogues particularly look bereft and were crying as they were forcibly moved further from their siblings. My heart broke.

 

2) When I do remove Word's auto paragraph spacing option and then go ahead and paste it, it goes the other way around and squeezes all paragraphs together, killing more than a few innocent tittles and quotation marks in the ensuing carnage.

 

3) When using the 'paste from word' option, it has this hilariously inconsistent way of keeping tabspaces on SOME paragraphs while completely removing them in others. While I can easily fix this manually, it's impossible in longer chapters, particularly those with one sentence, one line, dialogue paragraphs.

 

4) I can of course paste text only. But yep, you guessed it. It removes italicization and other special voodoo as well as refuse to justify itself. Extremely puzzling since it CAN apparently support justifying text but it doesn't have the said button in the tinyMCE toolbox.

 

5) It has a hyperlinking button but always strips links afterwards. Not that I actually care about this function, it just seems paradoxical that it's offered when it's actually not.

 

EDIT: hmmmm.... it seems like adding paragraph spacing BEFORE a paragraph in Word makes tinyMCE behave and maintain only one line space after the paragraphs. EUREKA! But still... curiouser and curiouser...

 

EDIT 2: It actually only maintains the one line space after paragraphs if you do the thing I did above AND not hit the preview button. Just add it outright.

 

ANYWHO! Am I missing anything glaring? Are these problems your problems as well? Am I the only one in this thread who is drinking cold coffee right now? What do you think of the colors Mauve and Magenta?

[Nephylim]

I've never had any problems with pasting into efiction. I am totally inept with technology so maybe that's it. i don't do anything fancy and I expect it to work and it does.

 

I am not actually drinking cold coffee but I am drinking hot, strong black coffee through a straw (don't ask )

 

I like all colours in the purple family although I have to admit that I prefer violet and the other blue tinted purples as opposed to the mauve spectrum of the pink tinted ones. Although I do adore magenta for its schizophrenia and edginess, in that it is right on the edge of pink and purple, sometimes falling on one side and sometimes on the other.

 

My fvourite colour at the moment is turquoise but it changes

[Hylas]

Maybe it's because I use Word 2007.

 

I envy the hotness of thy coffee but blech at its lack of sugar, cream, and various thingies that make it palatable to my urm... palate. And considering I like licking at powdered chocolate um... powder, I really can't diss your use of a straw.

 

And orange ftw.

[Rilbur]

Basically, it's because WYSIWYG editors REALLY do not work nice with word processors at the moment. I get around this by hand-coding everything into HTML, and then uploading that file into e-fiction. I just have to be careful when I need the < and > characters, because the WYSIWYG editor STILL tries to parse those like they're actual internet code.

[Eddy]

Very interesting topic.

 

On the reader side of things, I always rework formatting. Doesn't always work the way I want though. Paragraph spacing, first line indent can be most troublesome.

 

I'm running Linux 'Ubuntu' and use OpenOffice which is very much like Word -- except it is free.

 

Have never been unable to predict why some files are impossible to work with while others rework with minimum effort. Other web sites are also in the same mixup. OpenOffice does not have a 'clear formatting' option so that is not a work-a-round either.

 

I will follow this topic with a hope for some logical input on this topic.

Edited June 29, 2010 by Eddy

[John Doe]

I have the same issues too. You can copy and paste from Word, you just have to edit and delete whatever is pasted and re pasted it one or two more times. It usually finds the correct format and keeps whatever you did you the words intact (except if you color them). Since the stories are going on an online site I do no indentation and just add a space between each paragraph (when I write my stories in Word). The delete all and repasting can be a bit tedious but it works and it's faster and easier than manually fixing it on the small box for the story.

 

 

[Hylas]

Hm. Copypasting works (I tried two ways, copypasting within Word, and copypasting from Word2007 to Wordpad), but yes it does remove indentation.

 

I prefer to indent my paragraphs even though it will be viewed online. Admittedly, it looks spread out especially since my native resolution is pretty high (I have dual monitors, and my main one is widescreen which makes online text appear even wider to me). Maybe I should stop indenting as well... hm....

 

Oh and Rilbur, it can get quite tiresome to hand code html when you have lots of dialogue lines. LOL. But yes I would if it wasn't again too much trouble. I'd have wanted to try word2html converters but they still butcher up my indentation anyway.

 

I just trust in the force and delete the rubbish spam that Word generates on top of its own html exporter. For those unfamiliar with html, if you paste from word into eFiction directly and notice gibberish on top about missing fonts and stuff that aren't part of your story when you preview it, click the html button in the eFiction editor and simply delete all the stuff enclosed in the first

<p>

tag. This means everything between the first instance of

<p>

and the appearance of the first

 <![endif]--> 

It's usually apparent to you anyway since they won't contain any words from your actual story text within them.

 

OpenOffice presents too many problems for me as well. Even more than Word, so I gave it up after trying it once.

[Hylas]

Here are more observations:

 

Do not use the italics formatting when replying to a reader's comment on your story. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they are all in italics by default anyway. This will make your reply disappear as I have discovered.

[Forty-Two]

Here are more observations:

 

Do not use the italics formatting when replying to a reader's comment on your story. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they are all in italics by default anyway. This will make your reply disappear as I have discovered.

 

Thank you for solving this mystery for me! I always wondered what it was that made author responses disappear into the ether...

 

Also, I cut and paste from Word, and I find it does add a bunch of the HTML gibberish at the top, but if I just hit the preview button one more time it makes it go away. I find that if I leave a blank line at the top, a blank line at the end, and then don't touch it once it's pasted it works out okay.