Friday, April 17, 2009

Blogger Formatting Advice Wanted!

Anyone know a good way to paste from another program without also pasting a bunch of crappy formatting? I am having a devil of a time with my Discovery Showcases because I want to preserve formatting, but Blogger HATES the way Microsoft Word formats. And don't forget, I'm a CERTIFIED EXPERT IN WORD and I'm STILL having trouble with the formatting. I'm tempted to re-download OpenOffice, just so I have an alternative word processor. (And I probably lost the right to display my Office Specialist graphic just for writing such a heretical statement.)

Okay. Deep sigh. Here's my problem:

In pasting from Word, Blogger in Draft--which is the mode I was forced to turn back on in order to do tomorrow's Discovery Showcase--complains about Word's formatting. (Classic Blogger just happily mangles whatever I paste). I then pasted it from my Gmail program and although it accepts the formatting, it still don't look look good enough to make me happy. I'm living with that for now.

In the past, I have also tried saving as filtered HTML, but then I lost first paragraph indents. Grr! So I did my search-and-replace magic on paragraph marks, so I have a space between paragraphs. The result is  acceptable, but WHAT A PAIN!

Does anyone have any suggestions? Other than moving to WordPress?

8 comments:

Mulluane said...

When I did my reader interviews I pasted to notepad. If I needed to strip email formatting I used StripmailDo not use Compose, paste to HTML.

I had no problems.

Tia Nevitt said...

I guess I should have mentioned that I didn't want to paste to HTML because I wanted to preserve the italics in a heavily-italicized excerpt.

Stripmail looks interesting; I'll try it.

SciFiGuy said...

Hi Tia if you have access try Dreamweaver. It handles cut and paste from Word really well and strips all the Microsoft crap but retains formatting, links etc. Then you can switch to code view and just cut and paste the clean HTML code from Dreamweaver into Blogger. Voila.
I have been doing it that way since the beginning. Most of my posts start out as drafts in Word. Email me if you want more info.

Todd Newton said...

When I go from MS Word to Blogger, I copy the text and paste it to the HTML portion (rather than Compose) then just re-italicize and re-bold whatever needs fixing. This is, of course, if you have simple paragraphs and not a lot of alignment, but I've found no easier way. MS Word just does not know how to effectively export to HTML without bloating the code like a balloon.

Anonymous said...

I use Dreamweaver, too, but it's an expensive piece of software -- if you don't already have it, it's probably not something you'd purchase for this task. I use Wordpress for our blog, and most copying and pasting comes out nicely (even right off the web), though I do have to mess with the code a bit.

Stephanie Leary said...

Copy the source code of your saved filtered HTML into WordOff.

Tia Nevitt said...

Thanks, Stephanie! That looks like EXACTLY what I need!

I am going to look into Dreamweaver too, since I'm toying with expanding my skillset, anyway.

ediFanoB said...

Wordoff is a quite interesting tool. Thank you.