Folks who post stories in WbA - how do you make it hassle-free?

I've been copy and pasting from a Word Doc / Google Doc (tried both) and I've been having some severe formatting issues, usually having to do with italics, font size, or spacing.

What's the easy way to do this?

It seems like the site interface isn't super-friendly to some aspect of how I'm accessing it (Mac, Word for Mac, something about Google Docs, copy/paste in general not getting the format right, etc.)

Thoughts?

 

how the hell do you get any formatting to carry over? It's all plain text for me. Every time I post anything in WBA I have to go through manually adding all formatting.

 

That's what I had to do for this last chapter. Before, I'd just copy/paste straight from Word, and it would look kinda off after I pasted it, and then I'd hit "Switch Editor Mode" and it would pop into the normal Verdana / normal size. Now, though, when I hit the Editor Mode button it puts [ I ] tags on every single line for some who-the-hell-knows reason.

I'm not tech-savvy enough to say this with any confidence, but shouldn't there be kind kind of "paste and match formatting" thing or a way to import Documents? It literally look me 45 minutes from when I wanted to post my new chapter to fiddling with it enough to post it correctly.

Not ruling out the possibility that I'm just an idiot, though, and missing an easy way to do it.

 

I don't know much about this kind of thing, but maybe you try to could copy your text into some online bbcode converter (or this) and then post it into wba?

As I said, it's just a suggestion, I don't understand coding.

 

I have an edging-on-embarrasing workaround that works, but it takes me a couple of minutes:

1. Post the whole thing into a new post box on firefox. The formatting stays like it was, but the font and colors are all wrong.

2. Press a button that firefox editor has, and chrome does not - "Switch Editor Mode".

3. Copy the whole thing to a notepad.

4. delete all of the excess tags (font and color) via replacing with empty strings.

5. Somehow, the whole post gets wrapped in an extra [ B ] tag. Delete both of them - the opening one at the start, and the closing one at the end.

6. Copy and paste the whole thing in chrome, in the thread you want to.

7. ???

8. Post-it.

 

I've taken to writing with DLP formatting in Word. As in, if I want italics, I wrap it in the tags as I'm writing instead of using the italics button. I bold chapter titles and center scene breaks the same way. That way when I post on DLP, I just have to redo the line breaks with Enter and I'm good to go.

It's still a bit tedious if the post is large, but at least now I don't have to manually look for and insert all the italics and format scene breaks, which was a major pain.

 

So this is really weird. I've never been able to paste any text with formatting into DLP; it's always just come out as plain text entirely. Not bad formatting, just no formatting at all. I didn't even realise anything else was possible until this thread.

I just opened DLP up in Internet Explorer. No change to my DLP settings, just my browser. It works I can paste stuff into the reply box and it has formatting.

 

It depends on browser.

I use Firefox for posting as it carries formatting across (but gets rid of line spaces between paragraphs if pasted from FFN doc manager, annoyingly). If I want to edit a post then I use Chrome as big posts disappear completely into the aether when I hit edit in Firefox.

I write stuff in Google Docs (used to use Word and OneDrive but it became annoying on my tablet). The route to reach DLP works like this:

1. Copy to Word (formatting maintained).
2. Select all, set Style to normal (colour, font and size removed, italics, bold, underline and justification all stay).
3. Copy to DLP in Firefox (Chrome would just lose the remaining formatting).

Alternatively, when I was working straight from Word and not putting in extra spaces between paragraphs I would do a search and replace (search for ^p and replace with ^p^p) then copy the result to DLP on Firefox. Always use the default/normal style in Word or weird things might happen.

Only slight issue with this way is if you want to use multiple fonts, colours or sizes.

 

I don't know if it's possible to implement, but it seems a solution to this would be the ability to upload documents and have the formatting be converted automatically.

I posted that suggestion to DLP Uservoice, if any of you want to vote for it.