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4:45:00 PM EST
Hearing Missing -- Everything But the Girl
Editing in Word
Question today:
I write my blogs in Word and then drop them into my journal When they appear they are full of "dingbats" which have to be edited out manually. What causes this, and how can I avoid it?
The short answer to this is that Word -- the word processing program from Microsoft -- has its own proprietary coding, so when you cut and paste into the Journals from Word, some of that coding will transfer over. AOL Journals won't know what to do with it and will then burp it back up as those dingbats.
How to avoid the dingbats? The simplest way, of course, would be not to edit in Word -- Wordpad or Notepad (which come with each Windows machine) are good alternatives, as is AOL's own text editor. What I tend to do is write in the AOL Journal entry space and every so often cut and paste what I'm writing into AOL's text editor, including just before I upload the entry. That way if something happens I won't lose the entry.
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
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I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who's been having issues with Word. Now I know there's even a reason! I thought maybe there was some obscure setting that I didn't have adjusted just right.
I've also used Wordpad and Notepad to get around the problems. I prefer Wordpad for composing text. But thing I've found with those two is that if I'm scanning a document, if I scan it into Wordpad and then copy part of it to the blog, I get some funky formatting things, too, at least on the line breaks. So I prefer Notepad for scanning purposes.
And thanks to csandhollow for the tip on the AOL text editor. I'll have to try that out.
http://journals.aol.com/bmiller224/OldHickorysWeblog -
I love so many of the journals! Today I thought I'd get adventurous and try easy designer. I'm not sure how easy it was . . . somehow I ended up with my journal as a homepage. It's a fun entry . . please give it a look! DRIVIN' ME CRAZY.
CYNDYGEE -
How come so many of us did not know AOL had a text editor? I use e-mail too.
Hmmm ... off to check it out. Hope it has a save button.
*** Coy *** -
I didn't know AOL had a text editor either. If I have a lengthy entry I type it in an e-mail so I can use spell check!
3/25/05 11:40 PM
http://journals.aol.com/lisit