Talking to Profy Users: Posts Formatting (Pasting from MS Word)
Yesterday I
received an email from one of our Vietnamese users where he reported a problem
that may be interesting to many early Profy users as well so I wanted to
discuss these issues here in a special post.
So here is
what Louis Le had to say:
I put in 3 posts in the blog. What is the reason the first post takes the whole post's area, but the other posts occupy only half of the post's area? Is it possible to have a uniform appearance for all posts, i.e. they occupy the whole post's area?
I have
taken a look at your blog and actually was very surprised to see some of your
posts were almost twice as wide as the others. Since we did not encounter such
a problem before we had to investigate it to find the reason and we have found
that such a situation is only possible when a post contains many HTML tags that
are generated by rich text processors, such as Microsoft Word.
Some other
blog editors I have worked with have a special button to paste text from MS
Word directly. This button clears all the unnecessary HTML tags from the text
you copy from Word to your clipboard and pastes the plain text to your blog
post. Unfortunately right now we do not have such an option on Profy so when
you experience problems with how your posts are displayed, I would recommend
using NotePad (or another plain text editor) to paste text to Profy.
When your
Word document does not contain complex formatting (for example, the document
only contains text, links and some lists), it will be inserted perfectly fine
because such tags are not difficult for Profy blog editor to handle but when
you use some of the more advanced features of MS Word to format your text, it
may cause difficulties with pasting the content of your document to a blog
post.
In the
future we will also add functionality to clear unnecessary tags and formatting
from your text but for now if you want to write a blog post based on some
complex document, I would recommend follow the procedure:
- Copy text
from MS Word (or another text processor you use) to clipboard.
- Paste text
from the clipboard to NotePad (or another plain text editor).
- Copy text from
the NotePad document to clipboard again.
- Paste text
from clipboard to your blog post.
As a
summary I want to emphasize again that for the majority of MS Word documents
that do not contain very complex formatting pasting the text to your blog posts
directly via clipboard will work fine but for the complex documents it is
recommended to use NotePad first to remove excessive HTML tags.
Comment
I guess it operates similar to the "Paste from Word" button on Wordpress - because this button both clears the unnecessary tags plus pastes the text itself. Also it has a better name for novice users, I guess: you know that if you click this button, your text will be pasted from Word perfectly fine. But some users may be confused seeing the "Clear formatting" button.
So we will need to make the decision here what exactly we should use to solve this problem. Though again, your suggestion is valuable because it offers an extra option to us :)
Click here to view the thread of comments.