Visual Text Editor on Aff

[ice]

Ever since there was a change in the visual text editor used to publish stories on Aff, I've been having problems with getting text to look the way I want them to when I publish my fan fiction. I don't post stories very often but it is frustrating whenever I do since the process is 10x longer than before. Is there some sort of guide on Aff for using the new text editor?

Or better, is there an option to use the old text editor? I use to work in plain text and copy and paste a clean HTML script of my stories. It was a quick way to publish them while keeping the text the way I intended (no funny indentations, extra line brakes, weird symbols or missing text formats like bold or italics). Now when I copy and paste I'm forced to used the visual text editor and it messes up the text. Pasting text directly from a word document seems to make things worse.

Another issue: whenever I preview my story there doesn't seem to be an option to go back to the editor to make changes. The only option is to use the back button in a web browser and doing that brings me back to the Add Story page and I need to add all the information again (Title, Summary, Disclaimer, etc). The only way to avoid this is to go ahead and publish the story then edit it later. But sometimes the text is so out of wack that I'd rather just go back and edit before publishing it where readers can see it.

Also, when pasting text the webpage sometimes lags or even freezes. I've tried using Firefox, Opera and Safari (I sincerely hope no one advises me to use IE...)

I couldn't find any discussion on this on the forum so I wasn't sure if these issues have already been answered.

Any help would be great. Thanks.

[DemonGoddess]

It's a rich text editor, actually. Because of how it works, once data is added, you have to publish before editing.

As to going back to the old editor and file type uploads, only text uploads are allowed. Html uploads were disallowed as they were a direct injection in to the database, which is a huge security risk for any database.

This link tells you how to fix glitches in your chapter data, from before this was added, due to word exported to html.

Without knowing which which word processor you're using, I can't really say what you need to do as far as copy/pasting at this point.

For example, if you use Word or Open Office, you want to use "paste form Word" as the option. This brings up a pop up, you paste the selected text, and all your formatting is retained. This does not read a raw html file for copy/paste.

If you're using WordPad, this link will tell you what else you need to do.

There are some quirks with earlier versions of Word, and Works files don't copy/paste

[ice]

Thanks, I appreciate the help!

Yeah, I meant rich text editor. Been spending too much time with wordpress that I must've gotten the names jumbled...

Aside from the file uploads I remember before there was an option to use either the rich text editor or one for plain text that allowed us to insert HTML tags. I never uploaded HTML just copied and pasted it or added tags where I needed. Is there an option to do that now or are we limited to the rich text editor?

I mostly use Notebook but for the sake of publishing I usually have a Word or Open Office version of my fics. Sometimes rtf. I've tried the Paste From Word option with the Word document but it misses things like a horizontal rule or adds extra space between paragraphs. I thought it was the settings in my document at first but after changing it it still does the same thing.

Edited October 28, 2011 by ice

[DemonGoddess]

Before, we didn't have a rich text editor. Simply a plain text editing field, where if you wanted to add formatting, you used html tags. Now, you c/p your text, and format it within the text box, if it's plain text. As I said, if you're using a word processor, you won't generally have to do anything at all, other than inserting the text from your document in to the window that pops up.

With earlier versions of Word, there seems to be an issue with translating the page settings. OO doesn't have this issue. Now, if you have your Word doc set to where it's supposed to add a line after a paragraph, and you add an additional line via carriage return (enter key), you will get another empty line.