The most popular word processor in the world is Microsoft Word. Many folks even use Microsoft Word as the editor when creating emails in Microsoft Outlook. So when these folks become bloggers they do what comes natural - they type their blog in Word and then copy it into WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.
They copy the text, they add at title and things like categories and tags and they save and post their blog. They think they are done and then issues crop up.
* Maybe a friend who uses Internet Explorer emails and says “Hey I cant see your blog or it has all sorts of weird control characters.”
* Perhaps you look at the “Source” or “HTML” option in your editor and are amazed by line after line of command codes that you can’t make any sense of.
* You preview your blog and while everything is visible, it looks out of place: there’s additional weird code, the font is different from the rest of your content, and very often it’s also the wrong colour or size.
This is one of the most common errors that bloggers can make. This can happen with almost any blogging software you use. If your editor is in the visual or WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) mode, you are likely to encounter this problem when copying text from Word. It happens because Word tries to preserve the formatting of your original document by translating it to HTML. Unfortunately the HTML it generates is non-standard and of extremely poor quality.
There are some simple solutions to this problem.
* There is the obvious, type your blog in the editor that comes with your blogging software - but that is not always convenient especially if you are not always online.
* Most blog editors have a button, usually called “Paste From Word” that is designed to help with this problem (the button usually includes the blue W to represent Word). This button causes a popup window to appear, with an area into which you can paste the text copied from a Word document. The editor tries to preserve the formatting while creating accurate HTML code. Most of the time this will work, but you should be aware that this function is far from perfect and you need to preview and check your post if you use this approach.
* Most blog editors also have a “Source” or “HTML” option and when you paste your Word text into this screen only the text will be pasted. You won’t have any bad code, but you also won’t have any of the custom formatting - bold, tabs, fonts - that you used in Word. However, you can toggle the editor back to visual or WYSIWYG mode and update the formatting.
save So don’t hesitate to use Word if that is where you are comfortable. But your best option is to use Word for the text only. Do all the formatting in your blog editors visual or WYSIWYG mode.
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