Under the old site's format, texts of stories could be cut-and-pasted from Word Docs. The layout of your new site doesn't provide any such click-on icons. So have I now got to go through the laborious task of keying the text in?
I just tried this using Libreoffice Writer on Linux - and it works fine. Highlight the text in the document, copy (ctrl-C or rt-click), then paste into the story submission box.
For some forum posts, I do this as a rule.
Copy from Word and insert using Control+C
My bookshelf includes 227 stories, which include 76 collaborations;
One Editor's Pick, Three Series Awards, Fifty-three Recommended Reads, and Eight Famous Stories are included. Go to https://www.lushstories.com/profiles/view/ChrisM/stories
Enjoy
Quote by ChrisM
Copy from Word and insert using Control+C
Well, the COPY is Ctrl-C, the PASTE is probably Ctrl-V.
Quote by lynnwitt
Quote by ChrisM
Copy from Word and insert using Control+C
Well, the COPY is Ctrl-C, the PASTE is probably Ctrl-V.
As long as the Lush document is in edit mode, it seems to work fine - I tried a test to see how it went. I had to adjust the paragraph spacing - the new text had an extra line space between them - but that's not a big problem.
The extra line break will be present if your Word document has them between each paragraph. Many people do this when writing:
Lorem ipsum dolor sita...[enter]
[enter]
Lorem ipsum dolor sita...[enter]
[enter]
...
because Word's default paragraph spacing sucks.
What you should do is this:
1. Open the Styles panel.
2. Find Normal in the list.
3. Click to alter/edit it.
4. From the dropdown at the bottom of the popup panel, choose Paragraph.
5. Change the Spacing After setting to 6pt or 12pt or something sizeable; roughly as large as your font point size is a good rule of thumb. You can also alter the line spacing to 1.2 (or something like that) if you wish, for a more pleasurable reading experience.
6. Confirm the changes to the Style.
Tada! No more need to press enter twice. The paragraph will have line spacing automatically added to it with a single carriage return.
If at any time it asks you to make changes to all docs in future based on this template, you can do so if you wish. Or save the empty doc as a new .dotx template file. That's what I do: I have a "story.dotx" template so if I want to start a new story, I just choose it from the file>open menu and my style environment is already set up.
Copying and pasting into Lush from such a document is then simple without any need for subsequent faffing.
Please browse my digital bookshelf. In this collection, you can find 111 full stories, 10 micro-stories, and 2 poems with the following features:
* 29 Editor's Picks, 74 Recommended Reads.
* 15 competition podium places, 10 other times in the top ten.
* 21 collaborations.
* A whole heap of often filthy, tense, hot sex.
I always choose 'no spacing' on Word. It's the most irritating writing tool at the best of times without telling me what spacing to use.
How on earth did it get to be the default word processor?! Madness.
Yeah, Word peaked in terms of its features/usefulness ratio at around the 2000/2003 editions.
Since then they've added useless crud to the point there's little distinction between the suite apps, and cluttered the UI so it's a slog to perform rudimentary documentation tasks.
Plus they've not fixed things that have looooong been issues like insert cross-ref not remembering your choices per reference type. If they had merely bug fixed Word 2003 and iterated it fractionally, I'd have had more respect.
Aaanyway, back on topic, paragraph spacing and styles are one of those features that really make Word stand out and be useful. Well, when they work. Pasting in chunks of text often brings unwanted style definitions with it, which are a pain to stamp out and normalise.
Please browse my digital bookshelf. In this collection, you can find 111 full stories, 10 micro-stories, and 2 poems with the following features:
* 29 Editor's Picks, 74 Recommended Reads.
* 15 competition podium places, 10 other times in the top ten.
* 21 collaborations.
* A whole heap of often filthy, tense, hot sex.
Quote by Jen
How on earth did it get to be the default word processor?! Madness.
It really is a sign of the End Times, that the default word processor in the world is not only cumbersome, it's actively malicious! Having to use pre-formatted header styles when taking stuff to Amazon took quite a toll on my sanity.
And that this could come from the same people that brought us Excel, a program so deeply frikkin cool I am unable to differentiate it from actual magik.
Tintinnabulation - first place (Free Spirit)
Comet Q - second place (Quick and Risqué Sex)
Amnesia - third place (Le Noir Erotique)
Quote by Ensorceled
And that this could come from the same people that brought us Excel, a program so deeply frikkin cool I am unable to differentiate it from actual magik.
😍
Find Leila Gharani on YouTube. Man alive I love that woman.
Quote by Jen
How on earth did it get to be the default word processor?!
It wasn't back in the DOS era. Wordperfect was the biggie for a long time but dropped the ball on porting to Windows. I still swear that Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS was one of the best word processors and 5.2, their first Windows release, one of the worst. With no real competition, Word won.
I have started using Google Docs for my writing. I was stashing my drafts on my Google Drive anyhow since I use multiple devices and profiles so it was a logical next step. I was able to set up a format there that pastes here perfectly fine (or did on Lush 1, have only written for Stories Space since the upgrade and it has worked fine there).
Quote by Ensorceled
And that this could come from the same people that brought us Excel, a program so deeply frikkin cool I am unable to differentiate it from actual magik.
And, yet, even it has quirks that drive me batty as an IT guy. Though Office 365 has at least made sharing a workbook feasible. The old Shared Workbook functionality was awful. I can't tell you the number of times we had to restore or otherwise recover corrupted .xls files because of that.
Quote by WannabeWordsmith
The extra line break will be present if your Word document has them between each paragraph. Many people do this when writing:
Lorem ipsum dolor sita...[enter]
[enter]
Lorem ipsum dolor sita...[enter]
[enter]
...
because Word's default paragraph spacing sucks.
What you should do is this:
1. Open the Styles panel.
2. Find Normal in the list.
3. Click to alter/edit it.
4. From the dropdown at the bottom of the popup panel, choose Paragraph.
5. Change the Spacing After setting to 6pt or 12pt or something sizeable; roughly as large as your font point size is a good rule of thumb. You can also alter the line spacing to 1.2 (or something like that) if you wish, for a more pleasurable reading experience.
6. Confirm the changes to the Style.
Tada! No more need to press enter twice. The paragraph will have line spacing automatically added to it with a single carriage return.
If at any time it asks you to make changes to all docs in future based on this template, you can do so if you wish. Or save the empty doc as a new .dotx template file. That's what I do: I have a "story.dotx" template so if I want to start a new story, I just choose it from the file>open menu and my style environment is already set up.
Copying and pasting into Lush from such a document is then simple without any need for subsequent faffing.
Thanks for the info. I never really considered this before - probably because the paragraph spacing is not an issue when posted to other sites.
Quote by NewLushSeeker
Quote by Jen
How on earth did it get to be the default word processor?!It wasn't back in the DOS era. Wordperfect was the biggie for a long time but dropped the ball on porting to Windows. I still swear that Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS was one of the best word processors and 5.2, their first Windows release, one of the worst. With no real competition, Word won.
I have started using Google Docs for my writing. I was stashing my drafts on my Google Drive anyhow since I use multiple devices and profiles so it was a logical next step. I was able to set up a format there that pastes here perfectly fine (or did on Lush 1, have only written for Stories Space since the upgrade and it has worked fine there).
Quote by Ensorceled
And that this could come from the same people that brought us Excel, a program so deeply frikkin cool I am unable to differentiate it from actual magik.And, yet, even it has quirks that drive me batty as an IT guy. Though Office 365 has at least made sharing a workbook feasible. The old Shared Workbook functionality was awful. I can't tell you the number of times we had to restore or otherwise recover corrupted .xls files because of that.
I do remember using WordPerfect once. But it's been so long now that I forgot what it was like. I remember once when some people thought it was the better program. I can't even remember what era that was - the 1990s?
I do remember Lotus 1-2-3 too. I first used it in 1984 when a department of over a hundred people had one IBM-PC with no hard drive, only provisions for two floppies.
Quote by LakeShoreLimited
the paragraph spacing is not an issue when posted to other sites.
Yeah, it is unfortunately site specific (or, rather, editor/toolbar specific). Some will detect multiple paragraph markers and consolidate them into one. Not here.
I think that's pretty much what the Lush 1 "paste from Word" tool did.
Please browse my digital bookshelf. In this collection, you can find 111 full stories, 10 micro-stories, and 2 poems with the following features:
* 29 Editor's Picks, 74 Recommended Reads.
* 15 competition podium places, 10 other times in the top ten.
* 21 collaborations.
* A whole heap of often filthy, tense, hot sex.
Quote by LakeShoreLimited
I do remember using WordPerfect once. But it's been so long now that I forgot what it was like. I remember once when some people thought it was the better program. I can't even remember what era that was - the 1990s?
I first used it in 1988-89 when I was doing my MLIS and that was version 4.2 (same two floppy setup you describe for Lotus). 5.1 came out in the early nineties, probably c. 1990 or 1991. I ran it on a white box AT-clone with DOS 4 and later 5. WP started to go down when Windows 3.1 came out in 1992 and they released an half-arsed attempt at a Windows version. The company ended up getting bought up by first Borland and then Corel, neither of whom managed to revive it outside of some niche markets. Apparently legal types liked it because it used very precise embedded codes for formatting so it was great for contracts and stuff.
It's very disappointing that the new Lush does not have either a previewer or an html source editor. Old Lush had both of these and they were very useful. You could see what the posted story was going to look like, and if it looked wrong you could look under the hood at the html code and see what was wrong with the spacing, for example excessive <p> or <br> tags.
Without these we are just floundering around blind. I requested these on the other thread and was told incorrectly by a mod that they weren't needed (several people have remarked that when they click submit, the spacing is different from how it looked in the editor).
I never use Word. At the moment I am using Google docs but that is pretty obscure when it comes to line spacing, with choices of single, 1.15, 1.5 and double. NLS, please could you let me know what you think the correct setting is? How I yearn for the good old days of plain text editors. Or at least a simple coding language like html where you can just put <p> when you want a paragraph break.
The software I use for a forum site I run uses a BBCode editor. The editor they use (under a third party license) comes with a pile of predefined buttons but you can turn all that off and just use raw BBCode. I had rather hoped the new Lush/Stories Space would go with something that like for both forum posting and stories. The main thing I would like is a few more formatting options for stories. I just posted a lengthy piece at SS that has chapter breaks in it and would have liked to use a slightly larger font for the chapter headings. As it is, I just bolded them but they don't stand out as much as in the Google Docs original where I made them a couple point sizes bigger as well.
As mentioned in my PM, I have Google Docs double spacing and indenting in the old fashioned way (easier on my eyes when I am editing) and then paste as plain text when I bring stuff over to SS.
