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:

  1. Copy text from MS Word (or another text processor you use) to clipboard.
  2. Paste text from the clipboard to NotePad (or another plain text editor).
  3. Copy text from the NotePad document to clipboard again.
  4. 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.