Any suggestion on how we can best paste material into the “text” window of the import contents page? If I copy and paste from a word.doc or word rich text file for windows I lose my paragraph marks and all the line breaks disappear. If I paste material with manual line breaks in place of the paragraph marks I lose some of the paragraph formatting (indents, line spacing, etc.). I have tried cutting and pasting directly from pdf’s but that also ends up with format changes. Any best way to do this?
I usually first past it into “Description” to get rid of weird headings, fonts et.c. but I have no technical problem pasting it into “text”. I just don’t like the verbatim-formatting.
I prefer to get rid of all formatting with only exception of pharagraph marks. Any word processor can do the work, The worst things are multple spaces and indents. But little prgraming can help.
I think there is a tool at the bottom of the input editing screen that looks like a broom that cleans up any weird formatting stuff; I guess it would be the same to first paste your stiff into a text (.txt) doc then into the import field
Hi Edward, the tool in the bottom did some strange things if the text comes from a word document. Unfortunately you get not the same if you putting it into a editor.
I do the following things:
I try Internet Explorer and Firefox. Sometimes gives me IE the better result, other times Firefox.
I copy the text in a simple Editor like the Editor that comes with windows to get rid of all format informations.
Interesting… I actually want to keep the formatting from the original file, chapter headings, indents, new lines at the end of a paragraph. I find it hard to read when there is no space between a paragraph and no indents, line breaks, italics, bold headings, etc. What happens to me is when I paste in the text, it all mashes together into a solid block. If I change the paragraph marks to manual line breaks, I lose the paragraph specific formats like the spaces between them, indents, etc. These formattings help me to keep track of a dialog, or who is doing what or sying what to whom. It sounds to me that most others posting actually want this stuff to go away. Unless I am mistaken? I don’t really find things like that to be weird, they actually make reading on a screen more pleasant for me. Hmmm…
Mostly I am happy with the format “simplification” which results from cutting and pasting into the Import page. I have only hit two problems with it:
hard line breaks tend to disappear, which mearns that a list of single words merges into one veeerrrryyy long word.
Accented Russian from PDFs (the Princeton course) goes weird. I have to do a manual search and replace to change all the accented vowels into ordinary ones.
I’m sure there’s a technical solution to both of these, I haven’t found them yet.
If you have a file created by a professional writer, you can just copy-paste any part of it and all formatting stay in place. But many peolpe use formatting tools queerly. Moreover their files contain a lot of “dirt” unseen on the screen. So, the only choice left is deleting all formatting.