@Alex: “I wonder if using another program to copy and paste from would take care of this.”
Some quick tests of other word processors using Firefox revealed the following. (All the tests were run with text I manually entered into the word processors and text editors, and I did not test these with Chrome, IE, or any browser other than Firefox).
For Windows: WordPad automatically adds spaces between paragraphs when you type them, but the LingQ tool for Cleaning Messy Code removes the space.
For Mac: In Microsoft Word for Mac, the user can format paragraphs to have a space between them. The tool Cleaning Messy Code at first does not seem to add a second space. But, when you open up the lesson, voilá, there is an additional space between the paragraphs.
For Ubuntu Linux: The application closest to Notepad in Ubuntu and which is distributed with Ubuntu is gEdit. But its behavior is the same as Notepad. gEdit does not automatically add a space between paragraphs, the Cleaning Messy Code tool does not add a space, and once imported into LingQ, there is no space between paragraphs. (Note that there are way too many text editors for Ubuntu for me to test them all.)
Let me REEMPHASIZE that these were quick tests. I didn’t try anything fancy and I may have overlooked something very basic, though I don’t think so.
Now something strange happened. The behaviour of Firefox on the import page changed. There are no more blank lines. There are no blank lines even when there should be one. Bold formattings got lost too. Everything is now plain text.
After fiddling around with it, I think the issue might have to do with the way in which you are importing these lessons (i.e. the original format of the text). If I import using the text from the first lesson (shown in the Print View), everything imports properly.
Are you editing the lessons in Microsoft Word then adding them to LingQ?
Yes, I always do that. And it worked in Firefox about 6 months ago very well. Then the problem with to many blank lines occured. And now since about a week it changed again and the formatting “bold” and the correct dealing with ‘new line’ and ‘new paragraph’ don’t work.
In Internet Explorer everything works fine. Strange is the change of the behaviour of Firefox, don’t you think so?
Well, I’ve been copying and pasting TV subtitles from Excel, which was going fine until this morning. Today all line breaks have disappeared. That makes them harder to read, as you have no clue when the speaker or the scene changes.
And the paragraph breaks aren’t even replaced with spaces, so the last word of one line runs straight into the first word of the next line! AAAAARGGGHHH!
Hiya. Have you tried pasting the text into word first, then it gives you options of how you want to paste it. Select “keep text only”. I think this usually keeps it in the same format but without complex formatting which means it’s easier for the Lingq uploader to convert. I had a problem copying some text from websites (sometimes it would work and sometimes not - even from the same source) and copying it to Word before pasting it into the Lingq uploader helped a lot, but I’m not sure if it will work from Excel to Word. Let us know if you find a way to do it.
Hi Kish, I’ve explained above that I always use Word. I write all my texts in Word before I import them. Since one week the format it no longer kept when I import with Firefox. It works with Internet Explorer.
Now the behaviour has changed again. It is again like I described in my first post: When I import a text from Word with Firefox there are now always 2 blank lines after each paragraph. This makes no sense. In between there were NO line which wasn’t nice too. Earlier there was only 1 blank line which was fine.