Tips for pasting text from word processing programs into your questions and answers

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Tips for pasting text from word processing programs into your questions and answers

MY QUESTION: Whenever people type their questions, answers, and/or comments using a word processing program (such as Microsoft Word) and then copy the text and paste it into Answerbase, the blank lines between paragraphs disappear. The only way to fix it is to manually edit the post by putting the cursor at the beginning of one paragraph and backspacing until you get to the end of the previous one, then hitting “Enter” a few times to add the blank space.

ANSWER: Copying/pasting from other editors is something that plagues many online applications....as Word (and others) have hidden tags in their code that get copied over and then distort the look/feel a bit. We're aware of this and as soon as its technically possible to address we'll make sure that is taken care of..but for now some editing will probably be required if they choose to do that. We recommend they use the editor provided for them in the browser.

MY RESPONSE: The problem with typing things directly into Answerbase is that there’s no “save” feature, so if anything goes wrong, such as the computer freezing, you have to retype everything from scratch. That’s not too bad if your question or answer is short, but for something long, it would be horrible.

SUGGESTION: You can type into something that doesn't have any formatting, like Microsoft Notepad...and that should copy/paste just fine and do the final formatting in the Answerbase text editor. We have had users do that in the past.

Status: Open Jan 26, 2015 - 03:19 PM

Answerbase support, Answerbase, "Mansion in Heaven" forum, Christian forum

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Jan 26, 2015 - 09:27 PM

Linda,
notepad is not such a good choice as it does not auto save.
A couple of better choices are apps like MS Word, or notepad++, both of which autosave...
Notepad++ is a good choice in that it is similar to MS Notepad using straight text, and is free for download by just searching for it via google.

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Jan 27, 2015 - 12:42 PM

Thanks, Heavy -- good suggestion.

I'm not positive, but I think that Microsoft Word documents can also be saved in Plain Text (*.txt) rather than the normal Word (*.doc) format. Then we can copy the text and insert it into Answerbase without having to worry about the spacing between paragraphs. Please note, though, that Plain Text removes all formatting, so anyone using this option will have to redo any bold and italic codes that are lost in the conversion.

Tips for pasting text from word processing programs into your questions and answers

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