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Is there literally any way to paste text to this site while maintaining its formatting?


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I write my stories in outside programs, but whenever I paste them here, all the italics are gone and the quotations go all screwy. I've been using the caveman method of marking all unique formatting with asterisks and then CTRL-Fing for them to manually fix them before posting, but considering the stories I write usually range from "very long" to "literally novel-length," it can get super obnoxious.  Has anyone found an application that uses the same, idk, type of text that this site does that will let me paste as intended? I just write, I don't know how all of this works -_-

Thanks for any advice.

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This is a test. Testing. Testing.

 

Testing quotations.”

 

Testing quotations.”

Well, the italics and bold work, but the quotations are still jacked up 😕 I've got no clue what causes that.

EDIT: Well I tried a bunch of different fonts and found one that works. The opening quotation is still slightly different upon pasting but at least it's in the right place. Close enough, I guess.

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Best way to handle quotations is to replace all the placement-specific quotation marks, the ones properly oriented for beginning or end of a quote, with generic marks. I do that by copying the opening quotation mark in the word processor (OpenOffice for me), Ctrl+F to automatically place it in the Find field, and type a quotation mark in the Replace field. Because it has no context to determine opening or closing, it's perfectly straight vertical and generic. Do the same with closing quotation marks.

As a bonus, if the numbers for replacements don't match, you missed a mark somewhere.

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On 10/23/2019 at 1:05 AM, TVGuy said:

I’m writing this in Libre Office

Gotta say man, this is an incredible program. It's really fast, clear, and simply functional. Can't believe I've never heard of it before. Thank you so much.

 

2 hours ago, Captain L said:

Best way to handle quotations is to replace all the placement-specific quotation marks, the ones properly oriented for beginning or end of a quote, with generic marks. I do that by copying the opening quotation mark in the word processor (OpenOffice for me), Ctrl+F to automatically place it in the Find field, and type a quotation mark in the Replace field. Because it has no context to determine opening or closing, it's perfectly straight vertical and generic. Do the same with closing quotation marks.

As a bonus, if the numbers for replacements don't match, you missed a mark somewhere.

Yeah, I've done this with my other stories, I just wish I could figure out how to copy and paste a story in its entirety without having to refuckulate it for this website's ridiculous formatting. As a person, I love this place so much, but as a writer, oh my god.

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3 hours ago, Bulge_Lover said:

This is a test. Testing. Testing.

 

Testing quotations.”

 

Testing quotations.”

Well, the italics and bold work, but the quotations are still jacked up 😕 I've got no clue what causes that.

EDIT: Well I tried a bunch of different fonts and found one that works. The opening quotation is still slightly different upon pasting but at least it's in the right place. Close enough, I guess.

The font color is black, though, which is very hard to read.

TVGuy's font was white and perfectly readable.

image.png.3590ffb3ae1e1b60ca39e738fe7430cc.png

Edited by Kei (see edit history)
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I think this is the first time I've heard someone describe LibreOffice as "fast". Don't get me wrong, it's the default office suite on many Linux distributions and is usually the first thing FOSS advocates bring up to people looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office, but it's still got some rather hefty system requirements for a desktop application, especially on low resource machines or if you need to run accessibility along side it.

Anyways, I do my writing in the nano text editor and generally don't bother with bold, italic, et al. This forum does play havoc with my line breaks sometimes and has a nasty habit of turning neutral ASCII single and double quotes into curly unicode single and double quotes.

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“Testing quotations”

Well, the above is what my quotations look like when pasting from LibreOffice into the forum on my Win10 machine.  My style properties on LibreOffice are set to 'default' and font color is left on 'automatic.'  My operating system language settings are set to 'English [US]'.  Again, I am using Firefox as my browser.

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On 10/24/2019 at 12:58 PM, Imouto Kitten said:

I think this is the first time I've heard someone describe LibreOffice as "fast".

Compared to OpenOffice or Google Docs this thing is like yeeting a spaceship through intergalactic space at a few trillion times the speed of light.

I've also noticed that the spell check doesn't screw up as much. OpenOffice, it constantly marks words that I KNOW FOR A FACT are real goddamn words, while Docs lags so much that it doesn't mark much of anything. I'm a definite fan.

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Huh, that's interesting, especially since LibreOffice was originally a fork of OpenOffice and according to Wikipedia, LibreOffice is still at least partially written in Java, a language notorious for slowing things down and increasing overhead.

Admittedly, I haven't used an Office Suite with any regularity since 2012, and the few times I've tried using LibreOffice Writer since were on a vintage 2011 machine with 4GB of ram and trying to run it along side the Orca screen reader, which is a bit of a lumbering behemoth in its own right(albeit, written in Python instead of Java, though I suppose running a Java Virtual Machine and a Python interpretor at the same time might be worse for performance than if you had two heavy weight applications running together that are both Java or both Python).

Google Docs is just garbage, no argument there and I suspect no one would even use it if Google's hype machine wasn't second to only Apple's. Admittedly, I'm a bit leery of moving anything traditionally done via an application running locally on to the Internet. Automatic or easy remote backup is nice, but I like having local copies of my files and being able to do stuff on my devices even when my Internet connection is on the fritz(personally, the most glaring design flaw of the Amazon Echo I have sitting within arm's reach is that it can't even tell me the time if my Wi-fi goes out).

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