Sorry if this is in the wrong place, it seemed to be the area dealing with 'the forum' generally.
I wanted to ask, I seem to have a nightmarish time when trying to cut n paste script
onto the forum. It never posts 'as is' - it ends up with me manually having to reduce the sudden spaces, line by line, taking half an hour or more to get a chunk of script looking faintly readable.
What am I not doing, or missing, in the controls above the posting form? If I try to directly cut n paste from Word, I end up with double spaces, and long lines of text that dont break where they should. If I cut n paste from Word to notepad, they seem slightly better, but still require crazy amounts of time to get looking 'normal'..
I kind of gave up yesterday, trying to clean up a new segment of script that I wanted to post, as it was just taking forever to do..
Hopefully there's just some simple dumb thing that I'm not doing - as everyone else seems to be posting material, without needing to spend a lot of time cleaning it up.. can anyone advise? (I'm using Firefox btw - not sure if this has something to do with it or not)
I go through the same. I've learned to prepare what I'm going to post by using no special spacing or formatting. I've spent hours reformating the plays for the contests. You post them, you preview them, you tweak them, you preview them, you tweak them . . . and eventually you get it the way you want it. Wouldn't it be nice to actually get right what we cut and paste the first time? Maybe one day . . . oops, gotta go! Just saw a pig flying outside my window.
Thanks Edd. I couldnt work out if I was doing something wrong - as the hours passed and I kept on tweaking, trying to get the darn script looking halfway decent on the page. Now I know :)
Note to self: 'Must learn patience' :)
I save all my script in a couple different formats for this reason. The format I've found that works the best for cutting and pasting into internet based forums is always text.
In MS Word you can save your file as a "text only" file (thats a .txt extension). Goto "save as" and then select "text only" from the "save as type:" drop down menu at the bottom of the "save as" dialog box.
If you then view that same file in Notepad to make sure the word formatting hasn't left any wierd characters. In windows Notepad views things as text only, without the extra formating that WordPad or MS Word adds.
You can then cut and past FROM Notepad, just make sure that you turn OFF "word wrap" through the the format menu before you go to cut.
When you look at what you're going to cut it'll look a little wierd becasue it will be a batch of coninuous lines. This is becasue there is no formatting. But, it's the extra formatting that's making things look wierd when you try to copy and paste them, so that's what you want.
Last edited on Tue Apr 22nd, 2008 12:59 am by LadyBug
You're double-spacing your script and the forum automatically double-spaces between paragraphs, hence all the additional space between paragraphs.
If you're using Word, you can format the desired paragraph(s) to make it 12 points taller and, when you paste, the Forum will ignore the formatting. That way, you'll be happy with the look of both.
