Want to replace messed-up draft with good version on my hard drive
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Hi. Too tired and too new to WP to work this out: The WordPress text editor somehow removed all the paragraph breaks from the latest draft of a long page. The earlier draft, with the para breaks, has not been saved by WordPress … BUT I have that earlier version of the page on my hard drive — stored as a PREVIEW of the FINISHED page (on the site, not in the editing box).
How do I replace the messed-up draft with no paragraphing with the finished version, which naturally displays no code?
Am afraid this question is probably stupid … but hope someone will be kind enough to help.
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I don’t think I understand the question. Can you not just delete the messed up page and replace?
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Thanks for asking, boblets. The good version stored on my hard drive had no code that I could SEE, so I didn’t think that pasting it over the messed-up draft (which I was looking at in HTML) would do me any good. I still don’t know if that would work — and don’t at present have the time to experiment. . . While waiting for someone to answer, I remembered that I had also saved the original HTML draft as a Microsoft Word file, and could remember the changes I’d made to it . . . Voila! . . . But many thanks, again, for replying.
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Hehe -many thanks for the avatar -compliment.
You should neverever paste from word. It will be a disaster, sooner or later. I’ll find the link for you in a minute. -
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Many thanks, boblets, but the lack of standardisation in this industry can drive a person to the brink.
My one interest is in getting my text onto the site as fast as possible. Where do I have time to learn all the tricks of a new text editing program? Later, though . . .
There were too many alternatives in that link you posted. Which (more or less) idiot-proof text editor would you, personally, recommend? One that can handle Times New Roman? Courier would also be terrific — I loved using it in WordPerfect but was never able to find it in Word.
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On the extended tool bar in the wordpress visual editor is a “paste from word” button (small square with a “W” on it). Click on that button and then paste the stuff from Word into the box that comes up and click the “insert” button. That will strip out all the messy junk word code that messes things up.
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Well. That’s a hard question. I use a textbased editor – of the most simple sort. I have a mac, and use a supersimple, beautiful little thing called Smultron, but the pc equivalent would be notepad, I think? The simplest of things is usually the best.
I write in that editor, and I add no html there at all, just normal line breaks (returns). Then I paste into the visual editor, preview it, and make some small changes, and add html if I have to. But usually I don’t need to.
Some people here celebrates the exellence of direct editors, but you’ll have to ask them about it- personally I prefer to keep things as simple as humanly possible, and test before I add anything.
I have simple posts with simple photo placements, so the visual editor is good enough, usually.
I am a great believer that fixing things by adding is a bad idea. Ideally, fix by removing.
But hey – that’s just me. -
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thesacredpath, BRILLIANT, thanks! . . . boblets, I once tried using NotePad, but couldn’t find the text I’d created, even though I saved it. Feel really small and feeble admitting that, but there you are … :) . . . Will have another go, as soon as I have a chance — although thesacredpath has solved my problem. Many thanks to you both for making this learning less frustrating and lonely.
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For Windows, Notepad will work just fine. I use Notepad++ (more of a programmer’s notepad). It’s free and has some nice features.
Mac, I think the equivalent is TextEdit.
Linux folks have a bazillion and one editors. For quick stuff, I like KWrite or KEdit. For more extensive stuff, I use Emacs. Then there’s Vi and Vim (the devils work, LOL) and Nano (only used it once when I made my system unbootable, LOL).
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I should add I haven’t had great luck with the Paste from Word button even after saving an Open Office document as a .doc.
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Well, if solved, then happy days, occiori. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it! :-)
katm – yeah, I know…. Don’t like textedit. Use Emacs when I have to. Hate textwrangler, Loooove Smultron, though. Free, delishious, easy, no-nonsense (no, I don’t get paid for saying this :-)
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boblets and thesacredpath — Of course my original question wasn’t about pasting in from Word. The reason why I was able to do that at all was because I followed the advice here, found through a Google search: http://bloggerdesign.com/246/ruin-blog/ . . . thought you might be interested to see that.
I got into trouble after the WordPress editor removed all the paragraph breaks — and I discovered that it had also trashed my earlier versions, which had those breaks.
Please don’t waste time answering this question unless you have a spare moment: WordPress says that its system saves drafts automatically, but does that mean it only ever has one stored draft — the last one?
Many thanks again . . .
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Not sure. I think so – that it’s only the latest version, but I am not sure. If it does saves several versions, you should see them in your draft-folder, I imagine. Hope for someone more knowlegeable to turn up here tomorrow.
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What exactly is on your hard drive? I’m not sure what you have saved.
If you have the text with your paragraph breaks in a form that you can open in some program, simply copy the content, paste it into your favorite text editor and then copy that and paste it into the wordpress editor online. This should retain the paragraph breaks, but lose the fancy formatting (bold, underline, etc). You’ll need to redo the formatting in the wordpress editor.
You also may want to look into an offline editor. When on Windows, I used BlogDesk. I’ve not found anything as intuitive in the Linux world.
/me wishes she was a programmer.
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