Publishing with Microsoft Word
by Puddintane

It's entirely possible to publish very pretty stories using only Microsoft Word and the Big Closet story tools, but you have to be aware of a few tricky things that Word* does that may be confusing.

The first, and most common trick it plays on authors is the fact that it uses what are called "style sheets" internally, which automatically affect the display, so a single carriage return is magically made to *appear* as if it were a separate paragraph, possibly indented on the first line, and so on, but these are all illusions, smoke and mirrors meant to lull an author into a false sense of security. It does this by embedding a block of special coded descriptions in your text with pointers that link to the places where the treatment of each little chunk of "different" text starts and ends.

You might think of it like this:

[In position 9, a little block of text should be displayed in BOLD; In position 12, the text reverts to normal; ...]

[This is BOLD text]

MS-Word will put this all together as:

[This is BOLD text]

Of course, this sort of jiggery pokery is fairly easy for a computer to keep track of, but any little degradation in the characters and exact locations within the file can result in what amounts to garbage.

If you've worked with MS-Word long enough, you've experienced "corrupted" text files. Fun, isin't it?

The first thing to do is to turn on the display of "hidden" characters. I don't usually use MS Word, so I'm not an expert, but poke around in the menus and you'll find a setting that will let one display carriage returns and tabs onscreen, instead of hiding them as is usual.

Tabs and other non-displaying characters on the web, are utterly invisible (they count as "whitespace," and all adjacent whitespace is collapsed into a single space in HTML) so any "formatting" achieved with tabs or spaces will have to be redone using other tools.

Carriage returns are also "whitespace," and theoretically just as collapsible as any other "whitespace," but are treated in a special manner by DruPal. Because of the way Big Closet operates using DruPal, our publishing system, you need two of them between every "paragraph," and none at all within a paragraph.

With the display of carriage returns turned on in MS Word, you can easily see if that's the problem, and exactly what problems you have to solve.

Here's a rough indication of what your screen might look like in MS-Word with hidden carriage returns displayed. Nulla facilisi. In vel sem. Morbi id urna in diam dignissim feugiat. Proin molestie tortor eu velit. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nullam ultrices, diam tempus vulputate egestas, eros pede varius leo, sed imperdiet lectus est ornare odio. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Proin consectetuer velit in dui.¶ Phasellus wisi purus, interdum vitae, rutrum accumsan, viverra in, velit. Sed enim risus, congue non, tristique in, commodo eu, metus. Aenean tortor mi, imperdiet id, gravida eu, posuere eu, felis. Mauris sollicitudin, turpis in hendrerit sodales, lectus ipsum pellentesque ligula, sit amet scelerisque urna nibh ut arcu. Aliquam in lacus. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nulla placerat aliquam wisi.¶ Mauris viverra odio. Quisque fermentum pulvinar odio. Proin posuere est vitae ligula. Etiam euismod. Cras a eros.¶

This example has too few carriage returns (only one per paragraph, recognisable by the little pilcrow, or paragraph signs, at the end of each — there ought to be two of them between each paragraph.) and is easiest to solve, although the story jams together into a block of text in which it's difficult to see paragraphs at all, and it *looks* like lot of trouble to fix. It actually isn't much trouble at all. Here's roughly what it will look like on Big Closet, if posted as is:

Here's a rough indication of what your screen might look like with hidden carriage returns displayed. Nulla facilisi. In vel sem. Morbi id urna in diam dignissim feugiat. Proin molestie tortor eu velit. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nullam ultrices, diam tempus vulputate egestas, eros pede varius leo, sed imperdiet lectus est ornare odio. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Proin consectetuer velit in dui. Phasellus wisi purus, interdum vitae, rutrum accumsan, viverra in, velit. Sed enim risus, congue non, tristique in, commodo eu, metus. Aenean tortor mi, imperdiet id, gravida eu, posuere eu, felis. Mauris sollicitudin, turpis in hendrerit sodales, lectus ipsum pellentesque ligula, sit amet scelerisque urna nibh ut arcu. Aliquam in lacus. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nulla placerat aliquam wisi. Mauris viverra odio. Quisque fermentum pulvinar odio. Proin posuere est vitae ligula. Etiam euismod. Cras a eros.

The only way you can see if there's a paragraph present is that a final line may (or may not) be noticeably shorter, which is a drag, not to mention ugly.

Even more of a drag is the fact that at some secret limit, posting long blocks of text without an intervening two-line break between paragraphs on BC may run into a limitation of the BC content management system, which blithely makes long blocks of unseparated text utterly invisible. (It's probably an internal buffer overflow, but I've never actually looked to see what causes the problem) Looking on the bright side, though, turning ugly text invisible might possibly be seen as motivation.

You can use Word's search and replace function to turn single carriage returns into two of them globally using a special "escape sequence" within Word: ^p (which stands, I believe, for "paragraph.")

Search for ^p (two characters -- the "hat," technically a "circumflex," is above the number 6 and the "p" is right there above your right little finger if you use a US or British keyboard layout.) and choose type "^p^p" as your replacement string, then select "replace all" or however this function appears on your particular system. You can safely ignore any extra carriage returns between paragraphs, as they will be ignored once you get to Big Closet's default story entry page.

Too many carriage returns, especially when they appear *inside* the paragraphs, is actually worse, because one has to take these out "by hand," although it's sometimes possible through clever search and replace strategies to select out paragraphs and "replace" these, and these alone, with a special string (I like [[PARAGRAPH]] just like that, as it's unlikely to appear in the text) and then turn all the carriage returns into spaces, then turn [[PARAGRAPH]] into ^p^p as a global replace.

One usually sees too many in files designed for "ASCII" bulletin board systems, which required every line to end somewhere around or under seventy-two, or eighty, whatever... characters, as if it were a piece of paper in an old-fashioned typewriter.

The problem with this was that some authors used tabs to indicate paragraphs, as they do in newspapers and some books, and these (as we observed above) are utterly invisible on the BC screen.

Here's a rough indication of what your edit screen¶ might look like with hidden carriage returns displayed.¶ Nulla facilisi. In vel sem. Morbi id urna in¶ diam dignissim feugiat. Proin molestie tortor eu¶ velit. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nullam ultrices,¶ diam tempus vulputate egestas, eros pede varius¶ leo, sed imperdiet lectus est ornare odio.

If so, careful use of those special search "escape strings" can save one, as "^t" represents a tab, so you can search and replace "^t" with [[PARAGRAPH]] as above, then change the carriage returns to spaces, then proceed as above to a final "clean file."

Once this has been done, you can "select all" off the screen and simply paste it into the story entry box and you're *almost* done.

At the top of the story entry box are a row of little icons. Each of these does something special that can add to the overall "look and feel" of your story with very little effort.

For now, we'll address only a few. Each quick description will be followed by an example, which may be on the same line, or several following lines, displaying what each button does.

B = BOLD

I = Italics

U = Underline

C = Center

Q = "QUOTE" (This is a method of indenting a block of text, which could be used to indicate a written note that a character reads in the text, for example.)

Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

H = Header Another form of BOLD, with added code that changes the colour and size. (This is a quick way of making a distinctive Title, for example.)

TITLE

S = Secret (This is a method used to make words either invisible or inconspicuous, so you could use them for the "punchline" of a joke, for example.)

{Highlight to read} And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

Y = Another form of Italics, with added code that changes the colour and size. (These can be used for author names or mental telepathy, for two examples only.)

The Shadow knows! [sinister laughter]

_ = "non-break space" (These can be used to create kludgy paragraph indents)

      Six kludgy indents.

n = "Normal text," neither italic nor bold, with added code that changes the colour and size. (These can be used for author names, for one example only.)

by Mark Twain

< = Insert a special code which allows a "less than" sign to appear in the text. (Unless you need to do this, you can safely ignore this icon and button.)

> = Insert a special code which allows a "greater than" sign to appear in the text. (Unless you need to do this, you can safely ignore this icon and button.)

L = LARGE Make text larger.

s = small Make text smaller

With the exception of "_" which inserts a single non-breaking space, all these buttons are typically used by highlighting a word or phrase and then clicking on the button. Experiment and you can see what they do using "PREVIEW," and as long as you don't "POST" the result, no harm can come. Just navigate away from the entry page using any of the buttons at the top or side.

Most of these can be "piled on each other," so you can add italics to bold and get italicised bold. Just keep pressing buttons.

====================

The buttons that insert complicated text leave behind code, and the code can be edited. The title at the top of this blog page is a little unbalanced, for example, and can be improved by "tweaking" the code slightly.

Here's the raw code as it will appear in the story box:

<strong><font face='verdana,arial,geneva,sanserif' size='6' color='#A05'>Publishing with Microsoft Word</font></strong>
<font face='verdana,arial,geneva,sanserif' size='2' color='#603'>by Puddintane</font>

I'll pick on the size attributes: size='6' and size='2' respectively. It's easy to see and fairly intuitive. Larger numbers make the enclosed text bigger. Smaller numbers make the enclosed text smaller.

Since I want to create a more balanced appearance, I'll change the big number, 6, to make it smaller by one. Then I'll change the small number, 2, to make it larger by one.

Here's what it looks like:

Publishing with Microsoft Word
by Puddintane

Pretty good, but it could be better, maybe, if it were centred, so I can highlight the title and author clumps of code and add centring using the C button.

That edit looks like this:

The five little pictures that follow can be ignored for now, except the little picture on the very end, which looks like a/b, only prettier.

What this does is to allow you to control what's included in the introduction to your story which forms the entry link to the story itself. It does this by placing a special "comment" in the text that looks like this:

<!--break-->

I made this bold as well as indented it, because it's very important. Everything above the "break" line (within reason) will be displayed in the little entry box. Everything below it will always be displayed only when reading the actual story file.

I put it right at the bottom of the first paragraph after the two title lines, and you can see the result by looking at the recent blog posts directly using the link towards the top of this main entry page.

Cheers,

Puddin'

* NOTE: If you use Wordpad, or Visual SlickEdit, or BBEdit, or other professional text and code editors, please ignore this post and do whatever you're already doing. This is meant only for those who write and edit in Word, or similar "office" word processors.