Lost formatting and images during cut and paste

  • Hi there – I am in the process of building a website/blog. Today, I tried to add my first post to the blog page. I had a short article that I had saved in word. The article contained some formatting and an image. I selected all, hit copy and then pasted into the blog form. It lost all of the formatting that I originally had, and there was no image in the article.

    I clicked the “view” link on the page, and it came up there, but again with all of the formatting and image gone. I added some spacing and bolding, but there were very few options, not like what you would have in Word.

    I don’t even know if what I was doing would result in an actual post. Is there a quick way to fix this, or some settings that I could switch permanently to keep it fixed ?

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  • Hey!

    Word is great for print layout. It adds a lot of great markup to the document that lives behind the scenes that gives you really nice control of the print layout.

    Thing is, that same code typically comes with when you copy and paste, and that code tends to do some funny things to the website. You can’t see it when you’re in the Visual editor, but if you click on the Text tab, you’ll see if it came over.

    To help with that part of the issue, a great way to blog of web would be to use a Markdown editor or something similar. Automattic actually makes one called Simplenote that you can download on your desktop and mobile, it’ll sync with both.

    As for the images, images always need to be uploaded before you can use them online. You can’t copy and paste images with text. You may want to save all the images you want to use in a folder on your desktop and, when you’re ready to layout your site for web, upload them to WordPress.

    I design for both print and web, web design is a whole different ballgame than print design and document layout as it’s a lot more technical (it has to be able to display on diverse devices and on different, let alone changing, screen sizes).

    If you’re making technical document where layout is super important, save as a PDF and upload the file. It’s not as nice of a blog experience, but it’ll get the job done.

    Hope this helps!

    Thread Starter klik sandwich

    (@klik-sandwich)

    Hey Tyler – Thanks for the info. Even after reading all of the instructions,etc, on the WordPress pages,none of this was mentioned, or was apparent. So would Simplenote be used as a plug in on WordPress ? Or run it on my PC, create a post, and then copy/paste that post into the post page ? And for images, I would load them into WordPress and then move them onto the post ? Anyway, thanks for the info, I can try each way and see what works.
    I had a page many years ago, (03/04), and I used Frontage to build it. Then blogs started to appear, which I believe changed everything, and made blogging programs more prominent. Anyway, thanks, I’ll experiment and see what works. Ks

    Use of Simplenote is more of a suggestion than standard practice. It might plugin with WordPress, but I think your best bet is to copy and paste from there. Really, the primary benefit is that you won’t have the “extra code” hiding in Microsoft Word that might cause issues with your layout on web (WordPress won’t understand most of the markup that Word adds behind the scenes, you typically copy and paste it without realizing it). The auxiliary benefits would be that it syncs across your devices and that is has a nice User Interface that will make writing more enjoyable.

    Once you paste the text from Simplenote (or text edit, or whatever text editor), take a few seconds to add headings, italics, ect. Use the Preview button to check your work and Publish when you like the end result.

    #Markdown

    If you want to play with layout without adding the extra hidden markup, maybe look into using Markdown. It’s a simple, commonly format for annotating a text document without adding code (or having Word add the hidden code for you). If you use Markdown, you’d still need to take a few minutes to add the headings, italics, ect and remove the Markdown characters, but it might make the editing process a little faster depending on how you like to edit. I think that Simplenote will edit markdown. I like using a free Mac app called Writed when I take notes in Markdown.

    Here’s some basic info on Markdown:
    https://blog.teamtreehouse.com/explaining-markdown

    In this article, the author does reference a WordPress plugin that would automatically convert Markdown into HTML in your posts.

    Maybe more info than you needed, but I hope it’s helpful!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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