Web Editing

When adding content to a website, often with blogs, many peoplewill write the content first in Word (or another text editor). Thishelps get rid of a lot of the worries of web editing; having yourpage time out when you save, losing your work, needing to knowHTML, formatting, etc. Unfortunately it is easy to forget that Wordis not a web editor and formatting in Word is different fromformatting on the web.

In Word you can set fonts, colours, sizes, and other textproperties for each document and what you see in the editor is howit will look on a page when you print it. The web is a littledifferent.

• Web pages are often set to an arbitrary size that looks good onmost monitors or they are set to as wide as your window. This doesnot directly translate to an 8 1/2 by 11 peice of paper. Therefore,what you see in a web editor is not exactly what you will see onthe page.
• Using CSS and HTML allow webpages to have a consistentappearance throughout a site. Default fonts, font sizes and otherstyling are usually set in the CSS by an administrator, editors usetags in the HTML to apply this standard styling. Additional stylingelements can be added inline in the HTML.
• Titles and headings on the web should be made by choosing aheading rather than increasing bolding and increasing the font sizeas you can in Word
  

A web editor works by taking what it sees in the text area andconverting it into HTML and vice versa. When copying content fromWord into the editor, Word will try to preserve the styling andformatting that was applied to that content. Not only is oftenredundant (most people would prefer their fonts, and styling toremain consistent with the rest of the site) but Word (and othereditors) do this badly.

Paste From Word

Simply copying and pasting text from Word puts a large chunk ofextra styling in the HTML. Some browsers deal with this better thanothers, but it can cause a number of problems for any browser. Toeasily get rid of this extra HTML code the 'Paste from word' and'Paste as Plain Text' buttons were created. Essentially thesefunctions strip out all but the most basic styling elements.

Paste as Plain text will remove things like tables and lists,but it is the safest option.

Paste from Word is a bit better- it will keep tables, lists andsome formatting, but it will get rid of most of the redundantcode

Common Problems: when you do not use 'Paste From Word'

The most common problem when you do not use the 'Paste fromWord' function is inconsistent text. A typical case would be havingsome pages or blogs with small, Arial text, while others havelarger Times New Roman. While this is relatively minor, but itstill a pain for administrators.

More visible problems can happen too.

A rather serious looking problem that occasionally happens onsome communities is that entire sections of the blogs pagedisappear in Internet Explorer. Often this will show up as theright side bar disappearing.

This is pretty easy for an administrator to solve once it hasbeen identified, but it can be very disconcerting in the meantime.

1. If you have both Internet Explorer and Firefox, view the blogspage in both.
2. If there is a problem with the blogs page in Internet Exploreryou will notice that Firefox has more blogs displaying.
3. To fix this, go to the last blog that appears in InternetExplorer, and edit it.
4. Copy all the text of the blog, and then delete all thetext
5. Click the 'Paste from Word' button, paste the text
6. Save and the problem should be solved.