Elaine Corvidae ([info]elainecorvidae) wrote,
@ 2007-10-10 22:50:00
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Current mood: aggravated
Entry tags:bad-ass faeries, exile's burn, writing

I Love TextEdit
So I spent most of the day beating my head against the wall, trying to make the html version of the Exile's Burn ebook. I want to offer it at least in PDF and html, and I'm going to try to convert to Plucker, PalmDoc, iSilo, and anything I can either figure out or have someone else do for me. Anyway, you'd think html would be simple, except for trying to convert out of Word, which loads down html with all sorts of unnecessary crapola. Dreamweaver has a function to strip some of the junk out, but unfortunately it wants to bomb when it comes to large files. To make a long story short, I spent several hours yesterday and today trying to make the file a reasonable size, with only necessary coding. My progress was incremental, until it occurred to me to open the file in TextEdit and save it from there...and voila!!!

In other news, I submitted my BAFII story, tentatively titled "Desperate Feast."


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[info]jonathanmoeller
2007-10-11 03:51 am UTC (link)
Everything I ever write for the Internet (blogs, long e-mails, etc.), I write in TextEdit. It's nice and quick and easy. Besides, Word is just too much of a wallowing hog on an Intel Mac.

-JM

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[info]namfle
2007-10-11 12:51 pm UTC (link)
I converted a few of my stories to HTML. But I used raw HTML, none of that fancy CSS crap. :D

Here's what I did.

1) Save the document as a .txt file. This will automatically strip out every bit of formatting, but you want that to happen. Trust me.
OR
1) Copy all text and paste it into a new Text Editor program, if your program holds tab information.

2) Open up your favorite WYSIWYG webpage production software (Dreamweaver), set it up the way you want, and either import or c/p the text into it.
OR
Open up your favorite Text Editor/coding program (I prefer UltraEdit, but TextEdit works too) and manually put in whatever code you need, like your paragraph breaks, formatting, line breaks, etc. A lot of this can done with search and replaces (this is when having the tab info carried over is nice, because you can have a string of code replace the tab).

And if I had more time I'd offer to help you with this. I've been through a lot of the heartache and pain that you mentioned, and the text editor/hand coding was the one that I had finally established for myself.

-elf-

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[info]elainecorvidae
2007-10-11 01:32 pm UTC (link)
My biggest problem with just saving it to a .txt file was that the thing is 234,707 words long. That's a LOT of coding, formatting, and line breaks to put in by hand. And Dreamweaver refused to let me c/p into it, claiming the file was too long for a web page and I needed to break it up. It would let me open the file if I saved it as Word HTML, but would always bomb trying to do either clean up or find/replace, a problem I have noticed before on large files. Argh!

But opening the Word html version in TextEdit, then resaving it, caused everything to go away but the necessary formatting. It's like magic! ;-)

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[info]namfle
2007-10-11 01:51 pm UTC (link)
Ah, the horror stories I've lived through doing what you're doing. 234k words is a hell of a lot bigger than my 60k attempt and in that case I DID break it up into chapters, anyway.

A good text editor is geared for coding, so I'm not surprised yours stripped out the flotsom of your file. I just cringe at the idea of saving a Word file as .html, although if it works, it works.

Out of curiosity, what version of Word are you using? Apparently, Word 2007, which uses .xml, has it's own issues, although you could in theory do everything you're doing now without ever leaving the program.

-elf-

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[info]elainecorvidae
2007-10-12 01:13 am UTC (link)
I'm using Word 2004...I doubt I'll upgrade anytime soon, since it mostly does everything I need. When I was posting EB chapter-by-chapter on the web, it wasn't a big deal to c/p to Dreamweaver and avoid saving anything as Word html. It was only when I tried to do-it-myself with the final version that things got annoying.

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