Friday, March 16, 2007
- Crull Chambless
Many times content for your website is created by others in Word or another program and it's just copy and pasted in to your website. But as you may have noticed, sometimes your copy just looks odd in your site. Introducing format stripper! Nestled inside the text element's WYSIWYG editor, the format stripper helps you automatically remove extra formatting and markup generated by outside programs. This is especially handy when you need to copy and paste content from other documents or websites into your
Immerseme site.
The format stripper's icon appears on the right hand side of the bottom row of buttons inside the text element.
Even though you can't see it, your computer often copies hidden formatting instructions when you try and move content from external programs like Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat Reader or even a web browser. This hidden formatting can wreak havoc on your webpages by overriding the built-in style sheets of your site and making copied text appear in different fonts, sizes or colors. It can also make it difficult to use the text-element's editor as the editor gets confused by certain external formatting instructions. Since consistency is the goal when it comes to layout, we need a way to get rid of that formatting.
To use the format stripper, do the following:
First, copy and paste your content into the text element editor.
Next, click on the format stripper icon. A list of options will appear.
Try the various stripping tools one at a time. Here is the order I like to try things in. Try each step individually to see if it produces the desired result before moving on to the next step. The less stripping you have to do, the better.
1. Microsoft Word formatting. Click this to remove extra formatting commonly generated by Microsoft Word.
NOTE: You can use this even if you didn't copy the content from Microsoft Word. Often, this single step will be all you need to do. However, if there still seem to be layout or font issues, move on to step two.
2. Font tags. This will remove all external font tags which can be a cause of formatting problems. If there are still issues, move to step three.
3. Span tags. This may or may not have any effect, but try it before moving to step four.
4. Cascading style sheets. Again, this may or may not make an impact, but try it before attempting the final step.
5. All HTML tags. Only use this if you have tried the four tools above and still encounter problems. This strips all HTML tags and will result in your content being laid out in a single paragraph with no line breaks or paragraphs, no lists, and no font styles like bold or italic.
NOTE: Stripping all HTML Tags may require you to do some "rebuilding" of your layout inside the tool. This is why you should only use this if absolutely necessary. However, in some cases it is easier to strip everything out and reformat with the text element tools. At least you still saved the time of retyping all of the text you copied.
In an ideal world, copying and pasting content from other sources would work flawlessly. But, when things don't quite work out, the format stripper can help you quickly rectify the problem.