The Pub Discussion Board

Better solution:  For Microslut to get its head out of its ass and do a proper conversion to HTML.  They've had 20+ years and still can't do it.

When you save as HTML, do you save just "as HTML", or do you save as "HTML for the Web" (or whatever they're calling it now... "HTML, Filtered" is what it used to be...)

When Word saves a file as just "HTML", it's not clean HTML.  It saves it in such a way that Word can easily continue editing it.  This introduces a whole bunch of shit into the HTML file.

HTML Filtered (or whatever they call it now) strips out all of the Word-specific garbage.  It usually makes the file about 1/3 smaller.  Now, I have no idea if it will fix this issue or not.  The diamonds are caused by the browser not recognizing the character it sees.  I'm not sure why that happens, given that the pages are expecting UTF-8, which contains pretty much every character anyone would ever encounter, but...  *shrugs*  Old site technology is probably the culprit.  But if Word was doing its job correctly, those extra spaces would be converted to the character entity " " (a "non-breaking space"), which all browsers recognize just fine.

I'm not a fan of telling people not to leave extra spaces, because I still believe in the "two spaces between sentences" rule.  Supposedly this is not important now that we have proportional fonts... but this seems like truly backward thinking to me.  The whole point of the second space was to make it more visually obvious that a sentence had ended.  With proportional fonts, spaces are much smaller than they used to be, meaning that there's only a tiny space between sentences if you only use one of them.

An option you might want to try is, instead of letting Word do the conversion to HTML, use a conversion service such as CloudConvert.  They will convert directly from doc/docx/docm/odt/rtf to HTML, and it will be better HTML than what Word leaves you with.  No guarantees it will fix all the problems, but it should give better results.

Eric Storm

Who said any of this made sense?  If the browsers - ANY of them - would focus on standards FIRST and features SECOND (and release schedule a DISTANT, DISTANT third), maybe we'd get stuff that worked right.

Of course, if they stuck rigidly to standards, I'd have to rework this site somehow, because the nature of the way stories are displayed is very non-standards-compliant.

Eric Storm