h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Can I cut and paste onto a guide Entry form.
I like to start with a draft and then edit it over a period of days. Typically my pieces are between two and three thousand words and from conception to completion, I regard them as unfinished work and hate to have them read until I have dotted all the i's and crossed the t's.
Are there any other researchers who feel the same way about their work?

Yes, you can 'cut and paste' but, if you're cutting and pasting from 'M$ Word' it's best to paste into Notepad first and then cut and paste into h2g2 to avoid weirdness.

Amy

The Simple Answer is: Yes you can.

As the creator of any guide entry you will have an "edit page" button avaible to you and you will be able to return to any page you have created to tinker with at a later stage, provided you clicked "update".

Any entries you have created are listed on your personal space.

Lastly a note of caution: If you experience frequent power cuts, internet outings, general bad luck etc., and are nervous about loosing all your work in the upload to h2g2 - may I suggest writing your entries in a text editor like Notepad (not Word or Wordpad, which tend to do funny things with quotation marks). This way you can save any work in progress to your harddrive and copy > paste it when it is completely to your satisfaction.

Clive

So... let me see. I complete my work in the usual Microsoft Word Document format, cut and paste it onto Notepad and then cut and paste to a Guide Entry.
Really? Well, they couldn't have made that more complicated and 'wierdness'. What do you mean wierdness?

As Clive says, M$ Word does some funny things to punctuation. The most common problem you see on h2g2 is caused by the autocorrection of ' and " to curly quotes - also known as smart quotes. When people copy and paste text containing quotes, it looks initially as if everything is normal but, once you've pressed 'Post Message' the quotes sometimes get replaced with code numbers.

I'll try to illustrate this in the next post.

The answer is not to regard Microsoft Word Document format as being the usual (or even acceptable!). Make Notepad, ie text only, your usual format for preparing work. There's a good reason why the edit button (or view source option) on Internet Explorer opens in Notepad and not Word. That reason doesn't just apply to real HTML but also to GuideML: Word trashes things by trying to be too clever.

Yes the dreaded curly quotation marks.

Better to forego Word altogether and just write your entries in Notepad to begin with, because Notepad is text only which H2G2 can process in both GuideML and Plain Text Modes, whereas Word, I think, aplies formatting to it's fonts hence the difficulties translating text from one programme to another..

Hope that helps.

Clive

PS.

A few keyboard shortcuts that might help speed things up for you.:

CTRL + A = Select All (be careful not to accidentally hit a key and replace all the highlighted text.)

CTRL + Z = Undo, just in case you do accidentally hit a key and replace all the highlighted text)

CTRL + C = Copy All Selected

CTRL + V = Paste All Selected.

SHIFT + -> or <- = Highlight

CTRL + X = Cuts all Selected

Of course, now that Microsoft have pledged to make Word save in an open XML format, it shouldn't be too difficult to write a converter from Word format (possibly with a dedicated h2g2 template) straight into a guide entry. If I weren't so lazy, I'd have installed OpenOffice and tried the same thing with their XML formats.

Thank you every one for helping me out with all this. Having spent my entire Sunday learning how to cut from Word and paste onto Notepad, I think I should be fine.
We'll soon find out!