Whitespace on Archived Fic

[honeybee]

Today, I posted Chapter Four of Misplaced's Story.

I cut and pasted it from pages, directly into the box because this keeps the line breaks and formatting while using the Word Paste box does not keep the line breaks and sometimes not the formatting.

But this time, it whited out the text. I have used this method before without this happening.

[Alelou]

Speaking as an old middle-aged lady, the font size is also very tiny.

[honeybee]

I fooled around and got rid of the whitespace - but I have no idea how to make the font bigger. I'll see if someone else knows how to do this. There has to be a way, it just isn't obvious to me.

Not having to enter line breaks somehow makes the font tiny - and the line break thing saves me hours - so I want to figure out how to do both.

[Rigil Kent]

Speaking as an old middle-aged lady, the font size is also very tiny.

Ctrl +

Should work to increase font size regardless of the browser you're using...

[Alelou]

Oooh, shiny! Bless you.

[honeybee]

That is a great trick - but I should be able to make the fonts uniform on the site - I just fuzted around with my own fic to try and do this - and it took waaaay longer than it should have and caused all sorts of problems.

There must be a way to have the right font and retain line breaks when you cut and paste - I just have to figure out what it is!

[enterprikayak]

Oooh, shiny!

[EntAllat]

That is a great trick - but I should be able to make the fonts uniform on the site - I just fuzted around with my own fic to try and do this - and it took waaaay longer than it should have and caused all sorts of problems.

There must be a way to have the right font and retain line breaks when you cut and paste - I just have to figure out what it is!

My quick guess is that it's copying over some HTML code or CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) code that's mucking with the font (both color and size).

I've had this problem before on other content management systems and their associated editors when I was doing a lot of web development. The "paste from Word" function is actually there to strip out Word proprietary code that is not HTML compatible and that can cause weird-ass errors when the page is displayed in a web browser - so yeah, it would strip formatting, breaks and fonts on a seemingly random basis. It frustrates users to no end because that's not what they expect the function to do.

My suggestion for consistency would be to first save the Pages versions as text-only or, at the very least, as an RTF file, THEN copy and paste directly into the editing box. Saving as text-only strips out HTML, word processing programming that you can't see and other entities, like UNICODE or "high characters" that can funky things to web page displays.

[honeybee]

Thanks. I'll give that a shot.

On a short fic, it's no problem to strip out all the extra lines - but on a long one - it is very time consuming.

[enterprikayak]

Sometimes I keep a Notepad window open when working with Word and webpages. I cut from Word, then paste into the Notepad. Then I cut from Notepad and paste into the HTML editor. Voila! Stupid Gates-ian formatting removed. Works in reverse too. Pasting stuff you copied from a webpage into Word...send it thru that badass Notepad window first.

It's a hack.

I'm a hacker.

[Aquarius]

Doesn't that wipe out stuff like italics, etc., too?

[dark_rain]

Doesn't that wipe out stuff like italics, etc., too?

Yeah, I think so.

[EntAllat]

Doesn't that wipe out stuff like italics, etc., too?

Yeah, unfortunately it will.

And the Notepad thing works too. (That's because Notepad can only save a file as text-only.)

[Aquarius]

See, I don't think that's gonna help. We'd be trading one formatting problem for another.

[honeybee]

Line breaks are easier than wiped italics. And RTF files keep the formatting bugs. But every little trick is good to know about.