As a person who developed a content management system, I have many questions about how TypePad, and other blogging systems, deal with formatting issues. First generation stuff made you look at the HTML code. Following my first two posts, I understand that there are major issues in copying & pasting from Microsoft Word. Namely, if you copy from word into the WYSIWYG "Compose Post", it carries over the cascading stylesheets (CSS) from Word. The part of Windows that formats contents of the clipboard kicks in and gives you more than you may be expecting, not to mention the smart quotes.
But pasting directly into the Edit HTML textarea is not the best solution either, because then you don't get the benefit of TypePad inserting the correct paragraph tags. Pasting into the Edit HTML window, then toggling back and forth does not do the job as I thought it might. So, I'm using for now the process of pasting from Word first into NotePad, then into the TypePad Compose Post window. That sort of "washes" the text. It's like using Paste Plain Text, although it doesn't fix the smart quote problem, and you still may have to manually search & replace smart quotes with more Web-friendly characters.
Comments