Basic editing issues
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Everything looks OK when using the “Visual” editing tool. But usually the screen changes when I save and go to page view. Having edited many pages (not just posts) I now find the Visual editor almost useless.
Not afraid of HTML, I then try the HTML view. That’s not so pretty however. For instance a small 20-word body of text that I tried to format in the Visual editor ends up giving me hundreds of html code fragments that I can’t edit due to redundancy and complexity. An example of a small section of an HTML after using the visual editor on some simple text:
height=”100″ /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p>
Click to watch</span></span></span></span></span></span></span> </p>
The above section is a small sample of endless lines of this stuff all because I tried to use the visual editor. This of course makes the HTML editor also totally useless at this point.
Any suggestions besides always having to delete the page and start over?
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Can we get a link to the blog in question? Preferably to a post where this has occurred, so we can check it out in situ.
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http://jolsonville.com/movie-clips-al-jolson-biography/
I removed the privacy option on this page so you could see it. Note that this page looked fine until I decided to add another link with an image and a few words of text. Now the page formatting is messed up and I can’t fix it with either the visual or HTML editor, as mentioned before. So I had to remove the entire page until I get the time and courage to redo it from scratch. This is just one of many similar editing problems I’ve had.
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Should I assume my problems are normal? Eight days and no suggestions seems surprising for a basic issue.
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Nope. It’s just that posts roll down the page.
Usually when I see that code, it is the result of copying and pasting from Word. http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/11/09/why-not-to-use-word/
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To get rid of much of this junk, go to your VISUAL page editor, highlight all the content and click the “Remove Formating” button (row 2 button 7).
You can also use that page of yours as an example and tell us what you wanted to do but found difficulty doing.
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The “remove formatting” button did the trick. I went back to a number of posts and pages and they fixed themselves after doing that. One post, oddly, took about five tries before it equalized the formatting.
What’s really weird is that I also had a number of posts (on another blog) that all ended up with different fonts and sizes that I gave up trying to fix. But when I removed the formatting and fixed one, the others fixed themselves! Go figure.
Thanks for the tip (I probably never would have seen it.) Now I can go back to posting without fear of endless repair time.
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@trailmaster: Re the “go figure” phenomenon you describe, that happens when you have an unclosed html tag somewhere in a recent post (e.g. a command for bold text or for a different font, without the corresponding command for where that ends). Then its effect carries over to the code of the rest of the posts when you view them in a single blog page (but not if you view a separate post by clicking on its title). Once you correct the wrong code, the other posts get back to normal.
Now let me emphasize that my suggestion was a remedy for the mess in the posts you’ve already published. For future posts, the main point is Vivian’s: never paste directly from Word. Use a simple text editor instead, or Live Writer – or if you have to paste from Word, do it via the “Paste from Word” or “Paste as plain text” buttons of your post editor.
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OK, I’m back with the same old problem and have no idea why this is still defective. While I have to continually strip out the formatting by using the “remove formatting” button, it still is only 90% helpful. But that 10% of the time is a ridiculous waste of time.
I went back to a simple text-only post. I noticed that the paragraph line spacing got removed and all I want to to is add the line space back. Simple, no? All the rest of the paragraphs have them. Yet I’m continually removing the formatting, adding the space, saving, viewing, and wa-la, the space disappears! I then remove all formatting from the entire post and repeat the above steps again. And wa-la the space not only disappears, but another paragraph space down at the bottom, also disappears!
So here I am again unable to use the HTML editor because of all the unwanted coding that magically appears and also unable to use a simple visual editor even after all formatting is removed.
My suggestion to WordPress people would be to lay off programming more wizbang doo-dad, fun extras and widgets, and just give us a simple text editor that has at least the features of Notepad from Windows 3.1. That would be a nice addition.
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Addendum to last post:
An sample of the code that did not get removed with the button. On other pages, I noticed a ton of <div> tags that were still there and can’t be removed with the button. They have to be manually removed.
<div>In summary, the design stage is the easiest one to begin reducing costs.</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div><span style=”font-size:small;font-family:Arial;”> </span></div>
<span style=”font-size:small;font-family:Arial;”></span>
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So welcome back. But have you stopped pasting from Word or other sources that produce extraneous code (or started doing it via the ways I had originally suggested)? If yes, you shouldn’t be using the Remove Formatting function anymore, there are no “magically appearing” codes, and a paragraph space line is a very simple thing.
Or are you still talking about clearing up older posts only?
Please give us a link to the post in question (pointing exactly to where and what), so we can see if there’s something wrong with it.
Re your addendum:
Note that in my original post I was precise: I did say it was a remedy with which you “get rid of MUCH of this junk” – not all of it.
If by “manually” you mean deleting bits and pieces (like the specimen you pasted) one by one, then no: the quick, erase-all, way is to highlight your text in the visual editor, cut it, and paste it again via the “Paste as plain text” button.
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The posts I was working on were old ones. I wanted to go back and clean them up since the fonts varied and I disovered from another blog that the reason my sidebars all moved to the bottom was because of the formatting differences. I don’t remember if those original posts were copied and pasted incorrectly from Word or not. (Isn’t WordPress compatible with Windows?)
In any case, I went back and manually cut out the code fragments since the multitude of <dif> tags were easier to fix. Although it would have been nice to have a “find and replace” option, which I didn’t see anywhere (only had a “find” from ^F.)
So everything is OK now but I still break out in a sweat when I think I’ll have to do any cutting, pasting, adding images, and formatting correctly. I can edit and format a page in Dreamweaver much easier than this.
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Sorry, but editing and formatting a page in wp IS easy (if you except things like tables or other very unusual layouts); if you had read some FAQs before starting blogging, you would have avoided the complications you’ve created.
And the majority of computer users, therefore also wp users, are on Windows. Windows is an operating system, not a synonym for the particular peculiar application called Word.
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WORD is not compatible with any blogging system. It will add in all kinds of horrible HTML no matter what blogging platform you’re using.
Do not paste from Word. If you wish to continue to paste from Word, you will continue to experience these issues.
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