So you just finished writing some copy for your website using a word processor like MS Word. It’s exactly how you want it.
You beam into your WordPress site, start a new post or page and then copy paste your document into the edit window. You click publish. When you look at it live, odds are, it looks … weird! And for sure, it looks different in FireFox than it does in Chrome, IE or Safari!
How come?
When you paste a word doc into your post, you are also pasting in all of its code which it uses for things like bold, italic, font family and size, indentation, bulleted lists etc. This code makes for very poor HTML and can (will) make you go crazy trying to fix it. So, that is a Don’t!
What To Do?
Use the Paste as Plain Text option from your tool bar. Click the little T icon
When you have done that, this window will open.
Doing this will strip out all the formatting code.
I know … I know … you’re saying: “But Gileeeeee … now all my formatting is gone!”
That’s true. Now you need to reformat the content using the WordPress options. While it’s an extra step, you will end up with clean copy that is browser friendly.
Here are a few things to consider:
- You can avoid the above steps by creating your posts in WordPress in the first place.
- Stay away from using the Font Family option. Why? The font family for the text in your posts is controlled by your theme’s style sheet (style.css). Suppose you are using Verdana. Three months from now, you decide that you would really prefer a different font for all your posts. For example, Courier. All you need to do (or have someone do for you) is make that change to your style sheet. Once done, every post at your site will magically be shown with the new font. If however you used the Font Family option when you created the post and used, for example, Times New Roman, the code in the post will override the changes to your style sheet and so that post will remain in Times New Roman.
- Totally ok to use the Font size option. I use it all the time for headings. I prefer to use this option to using the Paragraph drop-down options. But, that’s just me.
- Totally ok to use the Font color option.
- Stay away from the Paste from Word option (icon next to the Paste as Plain Text icon). It still brings over extra code. But … see the tip below!
- Throughout this post, I have spoken about pasting from a word processor document. The same holds true (and even more so) for pasting text from a website. Very bad idea! ALWAYS paste that as plain text.
TIP!
Sometimes, when you Paste as Plain Text, you end up with lots of extra spaces between paragraphs. I have a trick for this. First, open up Notepad on your PC or whatever the equivalent is on a Mac. Paste the Word document in there first. You end up with a text document with no formatting. Now, copy all of that and use the Paste from Word option. Paste it into there and click insert. The extra spaces should all be gone.
If you stick to these dos and don’ts, you will end up with:
- Posts and pages that are consistently using the same font.
- Posts and pages that will render well on any browser.
- The ability to easily change your font, site wide with one change to your style sheet.
- A lot less headaches!
One last thing!
If you find that WordPress is eating some of your line spaces … you do 2 carriage returns and when you save it, WordPress eats one or two of them, read this to solve that problem.
I hope this will help you with your editing.
Questions? Comments? Please leave them below 🙂
Leave a Reply