Annoying Fimfiction Bug workaround - Copy/Paste takes out all paragraph breaks.

Problem Summary: When you Copy a section out of a Google doc and Paste it into a story chapter, all the paragraph breaks vanish, leaving one giant block of text, i.e. (cr) (cr) gets turned into just (cr)

Workaround: Highlight and copy the section as usual. Then open Notepad and paste it in. Then Control-A to highlight it again, Copy it from Notepad, and Paste into FimFiction. Use Control-Shift-V to paste Plain-Text (thanks to Zontargs ) Poof, the paragraphs stay they way they should.

I suspect it's from Knightly's attempt to allow Rich Text/HTML pastes. Seriously, I wish he would just make two buttons: Edit Rich Text / Edit Plain Text. (Edit: which he did, see below) I've gotten so used to typing [ i ] for italics, I catch myself doing it at work. And double-spaces after periods forever! Viva La Doublespace! (Yes, I'm a rabble-rousing Grammerist.)

Comments

[Wild Zontars]

Shift-Ctrl-V (or the equivalent on other systems) is plain-text paste on Fimfiction.

Standard paste from wikipedia:

The terms foobar (/ˈfuːbɑːr/), or foo and others are used as placeholder names (also referred to as metasyntactic variables) in computer programming or computer-related documentation.^[1] They have been used to name entities such as variables, functions, and commands whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept.

Shift-paste:

The terms foobar (/ˈfuːbɑːr/), or foo and others are used as placeholder names (also referred to as metasyntactic variables) in computer programming or computer-related documentation.[1] They have been used to name entities such as variables, functions, and commands whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept.

[FanOfMostEverything]

Wait, you mean it's not normal to type out BBCode tags?

[livinthelife]

(Yes, I'm a rabble-rousing Grammerist.)

Huzzah!! Forward! For England, St. George, and the Oxford Comma!

[Fresnor]

4586498
Yeah, I found the checkbox under the settings tab of the boxes toolbar that fixes that spacing issue after posting my first chapter. Which just means that the spacing issue isn't a bug... It's a feature.

[Odd_Sarge]

Thanks for the workaround, I'll try it out.
edit: Zontargs workaround worked for me. yay!
4586499
If that's the case, well, I personally am fine being 'not normal.'

[Rescue Sunstreak]

Just of note,

Double spaces after a period are no longer grammatically or sentence structure appropriate. They were used back in the day of physical type because of how typeset machines worked. Modern word processors and printers do not require that, as they compensate for the half space after a period.

[Oliver]

4586499

Wait, you mean it’s not normal to type out BBCode tags?

…No. :)

[silvadel]

I like double spaces after periods as well. It isn't grammatically incorrect, it is just a bit outdated in style. I also use oxford commas. I like how it separates the sentences. Without double-spacing, it is much harder to see where the sentences are.

Ugly! It is removing them.

[Georg]

4586498 Checked, and it works. Thanks! (added in the blog post) I swear, we crude Text-ists are going to have to be able to hit twelve-letter combinations while poking a button with our nose to deal with ordinary text eventually. I miss Script. Everything was . commands.
4586538 Goalpost moving can be so annoying

4586512 Too bad. I reject your absolutist authority in the field of creativity and substitute my own. Freedom! End sentences in Wingdings! Embrace Comic Sans.... um... Well, maybe not that far.
4586508 Simpler workaround provided by Zontargs. Yea for crowdsourcing frustration! (Now if only there were an *easy* way to figure out which quests I've missed in World of Warcraft to keep me from getting my third relic slot...)
4586507 Um. Do you think you could describe that process in a fashion that has a little more description in it? I couldn't make heads or tails out of it.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/05/Nord_and_Bert_box_art.jpg

[Fresnor]

4586614
There's a little gear symbol on top of the text box. After I pasted my work in once I was looking around and clicked on that to find a few slider/check boxes. Clicking on the Rich Text Paste one removed all of the extra spaces from what I just pasted in from OpenOffice. Of course it also mentions the workaround someone else mentioned of ctrl-shift-v.

[Baal Bunny]

My problem:

Other having to use the "indent" tag to get my comments to indent...

Is that, when I copy and paste from Word, I end up with an extra paragraph return between each paragraph. My solution was to go back to typing everything in Courier New 12 point in double-space with a tab at the beginning of each paragraph, and then when I copy-n-paste, it shows up just fine. So FimFiction's upgrades are sending me back to the typing lessons I learned in high school 35 years ago...

Mike

[kudzuhaiku]

I had this issue the other night. It was driving me crazy.

Also, the toggle to change the settings between pastes? It did nothing.

[Rescue Sunstreak]

4586614
Hey hey now, lets not throw around threats of Comic Sans. That may just be way over the line, like letting sombra plan your vacation or Pinkie Pie have a energy drink.

[Wild Zontars]

4586614

Do you think you could describe that process in a fashion that has a little more description in it? I couldn't make heads or tails out of it.

kek.gg/i/4WtxZb.png

kek.gg/i/3PGwSB.png

kek.gg/i/4XMVgn.png

[Bad Horse]

You can't have both copying of italics, links, etc., and copying of paragraphs. So it's still a bad bug. But a big improvement over just previously.

What I'm irritated at is the new whitespace fascism. I'm a double-spacer--I put 2 spaces after every period. It makes sentence breaks more-easily distinguishable, and now and then it is impossible to tell where a sentence ends if you single-space, e.g., It was I. Richards at the door.

Now, no matter how many spaces you put between sentences, they're displayed as one. Leading spaces or tabs before paragraphs are eliminated. Besides messing up about a hundred of my blog posts with tables, I just don't like the micro-management whereby the website determines how I'll format my sentences. That should be my decision. If I put spaces somewhere, I want those spaces there. If some twit doesn't like indented paragraphs he can f--- off and read somebody else's stories.

Not to mention that an important chapter break typography trick in "Anonymous Dreams" is now impossible to display on fimfiction.

[Wild Zontars]

4586688
Welcome to the electronic world of the future, for better or for worse. Now that things aren't physical, end-users (readers in this case) can determine how things will look on their end, and if someone artificially prevents that, they will kick, scream, and install various plugins to force the issue.

Online advertising pushed this one off the cliff ("Dammit, I put and ad there, and you're gonna see it!" "How about no?" *installs an adblocker*), and now it's spreading to every corner of the internet. We have a group dedicated to making the site function differently using client-side scripts, and rather than pulling a King Canute, knighty stops by to tell everyone how to dick with the site more efficiently.

[Georg]

4586710 But I don't want the future. Well, other than vaccinations. And indoor toilets. And cell phones, gotta have those.

4586683 Ahhh... That's where they hid it. Hm. Now I need to play around with the Smart Quotes slider and see how it works. Thank you.
4586682 "Pardon me, sir. I was promised a tour of exotic Crystal Empire locations, but once I got off the train I was slapped into chains and sent into the mines. Admittedly, there are some quite exotic creatures in the mines such as that horrid frog-like beast with tentacles, but this is not what I paid for!"
4586647 Control-Shift-V worked well for me. Haven't checked the other setting yet.

4586646 Word always did something weird with (cr)(lf) pairs instead of (nl) tags for me. Control-A - Strip Formatting seems to make it behave, but I still like Gdocs better because I must work on my stuff on six different computers.
4586546 FimFic doesn't really *remove* double spaces, per se. It turns them into non-breaking spaces, which is more annoying because sections like: "Behave! Down, boy! Heel! Get down, you mutt! Off! Yech!" get rendered as one huge word and screw up the spacing for a line or two.
4586688 It also makes it difficult to do ascii art even with the [ code ] tag
(/; (/; .--..-(/; | (/; __|====/=|__ (____________)

[Rescue Sunstreak]

BTW I am not seeing this copy/paste issue on my chromebook, but...

I am copying from google doc, to a direct mail here to my editor. WHo edits it, then I copy from his mail back, right into the new chapter box.

Makes me wonder, perhaps the act of using the mail system here fixes the issue? so perhaps someone having the problem, try sending a mail to themselves here?

[Wild Zontars]

4586733

Now I need to play around with the Smart Quotes slider and see how it works. Thank you.

It tries to render quotation marks as the nice print-style curly ones instead of ASCII 0x22 straight quotation marks. Depending on the device/OS/browser/font/etc you view it on, it may look different (or even completely broken). All I get on my end are slightly angled quotation marks, with no difference between opening and closing marks, for example.

[Pascoite]

I'm not sure this issue came up immediately. Right after the site update, I could paste things in fine, but the problem was that the blank lines between paragraphs weren't empty; they had one space character, which could screw up my assumptions about how to arrow through lines. I mentioned this to knighty, and then the blank lines went away altogether. I'm not sure if that was in response to me or not.

4586688
I used to double space as well, but what finally convinced me to stop is that FiMFiction wasn't that smart about where it placed line breaks, and you could get one between the two spaces, leaving a small indentation on the second line.

4586499
My GDocs are riddled with bbcode tags.

[The Hat Man]

Double spaces after periods? What, are we still using typewriters?

I kid, of course. You can use what you like (and I found an interesting article on the subject), I'm pretty sure that FiMfiction publishes stuff in HTML form which means it takes out the extra space automatically. I just tried it with one of your stories and while the .txt version has extra space, the html form doesn't, nor does copy-pasted text.

Then again, I'm a hard core proponent of the Oxford comma, and I can't even get my students to give two shits about it, let alone my fellow native speakers. Here's to holding the line on stuff nobody seems to care about! 🥂

[SIGAWESOME]

4586733

It also makes it difficult to do ascii art even with the [ code ] tag

[pre][/pre] tags for the win!

           (/;
          (/;
   .--..-(/;
   |    (/;
 __|====/=|__
(____________)

[Sollace]

I just keep that turned off in the editor's settings. No point in having it anyway, since I only every format my stories with bbcode anyway. (or bbcode and word markup as a preview)