jimnyc
12-05-2012, 03:02 PM
If you copy an entire story from another website, and then just paste it directly into a post here, it's going to hold the "attributes" aka formatting, and your post will have some letters blue, no spacing, images not loading and overall it might just look like crap, and certainly not like it did on the site you got it from.
First off, don't copy the entire thing, we're only supposed to copy 2-3 paragraphs anyway!
But seriously, here's what I do and recommend to others (thx for the reminder, MtnBiker)...
Everyone is going to have "Notepad" or "Wordpad" on their machine. If using a Mac, I'm sure there is some sort of "plain text editor" on there somewhere. This needs to be a plain text editor, as a program like MS Word will actually hold onto the formatting when you paste it over.
Anyway, so copy/paste your text from the story into notepad/wordpad. The formatting is now gone and all you have left is text and characters. Any crappy looking characters - get rid of them. No spaces? Hit the enter key! If you see IFRAME code (other than youtube), 86 it as it'll likely not load in your post. Make it look like a few good paragraphs and then once again - copy and paste it from the text editor, into your post, and it'll be MUCH better.
In short - copy text from story - paste into text editor - paste into post here.
First off, don't copy the entire thing, we're only supposed to copy 2-3 paragraphs anyway!
But seriously, here's what I do and recommend to others (thx for the reminder, MtnBiker)...
Everyone is going to have "Notepad" or "Wordpad" on their machine. If using a Mac, I'm sure there is some sort of "plain text editor" on there somewhere. This needs to be a plain text editor, as a program like MS Word will actually hold onto the formatting when you paste it over.
Anyway, so copy/paste your text from the story into notepad/wordpad. The formatting is now gone and all you have left is text and characters. Any crappy looking characters - get rid of them. No spaces? Hit the enter key! If you see IFRAME code (other than youtube), 86 it as it'll likely not load in your post. Make it look like a few good paragraphs and then once again - copy and paste it from the text editor, into your post, and it'll be MUCH better.
In short - copy text from story - paste into text editor - paste into post here.