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Chatmandu and HTML for Dummies
Sun, 05/10/2009 - 12:56 — Chatmandu
Okay... Uploaded Necessary Things via Notepad to SIYE. Paragraphs were hosed up and I corrected them so they matched the story as posted here. Using the preview function everything looked hunky-dorey. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the story this morning and found one long sentence, far beyond anything Kezzabear might post here. Called up the edit function to fix the mess - lo and behold, all the paragraphs are there. Everything is just fine and dandy.
Took the chapter down because I can't fix what doesn't look broken when I go to edit. The Help Desk takes me to Dino, who has other things to worry about than my lack of understanding with HTML. Do any of the smart people here know what I did wrong?
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Edit tricks
A couple of things come to mind... first is to try repeating what you did the first time and see if it does the same thing. If it does then being able to see the results may help us help you find the problem.
The second thing that comes to mind is that if the preview looks right but the end result is not, try copying the preview text, deleting all text in the edit window and then paste it back and save it again, see if that makes a difference.
-SC
I've never had a problem
I've never had a problem with html at SIYE. My only problems there were being edited by others but I believe that those days are behind us now. I always check my html, when I have to, by posting privately to my LJ.
Not sure this helps but its how i deal with my shortcomings.
Checking HTML and stuff
That is why I checked the HTML code here before I attempted to post at SIYE. I have not had this problem before, so it's puzzling to me. I'll fiddle with in later in the day. The sun is shining and the yard calls...
SIYE's HTML kills me
No, really, it does. It's broken in lots of strange little ways. And yes, Dino would be the ultimate fixer, but right now he's a fixer-upper and thus not available. But as broken as SIYE can be, so is every other site (including this one -- no strikeout, for example, here).
Things I've found work well for bypassing the stupid HTML problems to get "one" document that posts everywhere: MF, SIYE, FF, PSnet. (Note: PS is having a lot of problems with chapters now because the system there can't handle unicode, and down-converting after the fact makes it an exercise in finding what looks-like-typos-but-is-a-busted-font syndrome).
The process:
0) Finish all editing with beta team, generate final file
1) Save-As to RTF
2) Run through "docfrac"
3) Check: did italics, etc, tags come through? (seems to be all-or-nothing each time)
4) Repeat (2) until italics, etc. tags are in HTML output
5) cut-n-paste HTML output to MF
6) visually inspect it's right at MF
7) upload HTML file to SIYE (and other places if desired)
8) email HTML file to PSnet beta with note that it's preconverted to avoid unicode problems
Since switching to this process, I'll loose a tiny bit of formatting like a margin offset, but it's made everything else so painless I don't care anymore.
One more step
I'd edit step 1, based on my extensive use of italics.
1) Cut and paste the entire chapter from MS Word into Wordpad, then save-as to RTF.
This eliminates some of the odd choices MS Word makes with tags.
Heh ... I just type stuff
Heh ... I just type stuff and sort of put it there ... *scratches head* But then I am pretty much only dealing with SIYE and occasionally LJ. I just put the code in - but then I only use italics. Maybe cos I don't know how to mess around with all that other stuff.
I figure when not many people read it then it don't matter if you make a mistake *smiles angelically and continues on her way, ignoring coding in general*
Don't sell yourself short . . .
I believe you're more widely read than you're suggesting, kezzabear.
I've thought a couple of times about setting up an email alias for MetaFic users that you can email a document to (ODF, RTF, DOC, LaTeX, ..) and it emails back a properly formatting HTML file for various site usages. Essentially a mail script that does the step-by-step guide outlined earlier.
Maybe one of these days I'll build the software on the server and give it a spin. Or I can wait until Dino comes back and let him work out the tedium of procmail rules.
Rly? I doubt it. LOL The
Rly? I doubt it. LOL The stats indicate maybe 1500 odd hits per chapter. In a fandom this size? that's not a lot of people.
Yeah, really . . .
The stats indicate maybe 1500 odd hits per chapter. In a fandom this size? that's not a lot of people.
Are those stats from SIYE or FF or what? For SIYE, that's substantially more than most of my chapters get during the first month. The hit counts creep up over time, of course, but if you just look at the 30-day window from posting, they don't often go over 1000. Of course, I'm also not mainstream like Dave, so I don't expect big numbers. Glancing at a couple of Dave's chapters, he seems to break 10k often, but I don't know over what window of time that takes.
A while
Glancing at a couple of Dave's chapters, he seems to break 10k often, but I don't know over what window of time that takes.
A pretty long time. On SIYE, the second most popular chapter of MoO2 (after the first chapter) went above 10k hits within the last two weeks. It's been online for about 21.5 months. That's an outlier. The more average (by readership) chapters from the same time period are still in the 7500-9000 range.
Yes, I could make a graph. Hush.
A graph lol. They are SIYE
A graph lol. They are SIYE stats, the ff.net ones are not as high. (Srsly, I think RL is overrated)
Anyway back to HTML ... :)
Fixing the formatting problems
The latest chapter of Echoes threw a wrench in my system for publishing, thanks to a silent unicode issue in OpenOffice 3.1 and Word 2k8 on a Mac. Grrrr.
After much screwing around, here's the recipe that works every time as far as I can tell. I might even go back and re-post some material using it, as it's far more reliable than the other tricks I've used in the past.
One note -- now that I have this worked out, these steps aren't for the computer challenged. I'm going to slap together a module that will do all of this automagically given an RTF file input. I'll make it available to MetaFic authors once I get it put together. Then you can copy-n-paste the result to every site you want to post on.
0) Finish beta process, have final .doc file
1) Export .doc file to .rtf file format from Word / OpenOffice.org Writer / foo
2) Run "docfrac" (windows/mac/linux) conversion:
docfrac --from-rtf chapter.rtf --to-html chapter.html
3) Some sites merge words if there's no trailing space on the end of a line, so fix that (unix but mac/windows available via either fink [mac] or cygwin [win]):
awk '{ print $0 " " ; next }' chapter.html > spaced.html
4) Strip unicode symbols (quotes, accented characters, etc) via "recode" (standard on linux boxes, use cygwin on windows or fink on macs to get it):
recode -d utf8..h4 < spaced.html > final.html
5) upload and post "final.html"
Font question
The only thing which stands out glaringly to me is that the font is set to "Code2000".
While this is a perfectly good font, I have to jack up the size to make it easily readable, and I would actually rather specify my own favourite font.
Is this a Unicode thing, or has it crept in from somewhere unexpected?
That crept in elsewhere
If you set the font in your word processor (say, Garamond or Vera Sans), when you save-as RTF it will save that font embedded. Then when you run docfrac, you get the tags that include the font name and so on. After the conversions, I still had the font names in it . . . I think.