Microsoft Word Becomes Less Evil When Authoring Blogs with WordPress 2.1
Late last year, ContentRobot lamented that using Microsoft Word to craft blog posts was asking for trouble.
One of the bigger issues we had was wacky formatting of certain characters (including curly quotes that display as typos or mistakes in many RSS readers).
To combat some of this silliness for our WordPress clients, we installed Unfancy Quote by Semiologic. In a nutshell, it would remove any styling to the following:
- double quotes … “this is a quote”
- single quotes .. ‘just one hash, please’
- apostrophes … like the possessive: ContentRobot’s
And, bingo, newsreaders were now a lot happier and displayed clean feeds. Everyone looked much more professional.
Enter WordPress 2.1 and its revamped WYSIWYG editor. You can now take advantage of some “hidden buttons” that allow you to easily cut and paste from Word. The new buttons are “Paste as Plain Text” and “Paste from Word.”
That’s great! But why hidden? Oh well, it’s pretty easy to get them to show and use. Click here to see how.
And here’s a WordPress thread for more information about these buttons in the new WYSIWYG.
Wait…Microsoft Word is still evil with the new version
I love using Microsoft Word for editing. However, I’m currently looking for a new way to do things.
Yesterday, as I was tryng to create the RSS feed, almost all of my articles had problems AND I use that hidden feature above.
Also, as I try to submit my articles to other places that require copy/paste, I sometimes have difficulty with this using the Wordpress HTML code.
My recommendation to all: Create your content in a decent text editor (don’t know what yet) and have that be your source copy. It will work for most copy/paste operations.
And, never change your content in anything other than the source. Otherwise, you’ll have major version control issues.
Thats just my 2 cents.
Thanks,
Richard