Unformatting Lit Stories

[dr_mabeuse]

I have a story published on Lit and apparently I don't have a copy saved on my computer. I want to do some editing on this piece, so I thought I'd copy & paste it from Lit into MSWord so I could work on it.

Trouble is, it pasted in this funny format, as if it's all in a big window. I can edit it in Word, but I have the feeling I'm going to run into trouble when I try to resubmit it to Lit. I don't know how to unformat that and make it into an ordinary MSWord doc or rtf.

Any suggestions?

---dr.M.

 

[Black Tulip]

Have you tried "save as" word-document? That should bring it back to MS Word characteristics.

If it doesn't you can try to save it as .txt first and then open it in Word again.

Hope it helps.

 

[Lou Nuttick]

View the story with Internet Explorer (if you refuse to use IE, see next paragraph). Triple click on the body of the story; all the text between the paragraph tags will be selected (and all the graphics and other stuff on the page will be excluded). On Lit, this is usually the entire body of the story on that page, though if the author has italicized paragraphs, it will only select up to the format change. Copy and paste into Word. Repeat for each page.

Alternatively, you could select the text by holding the left mouse button down while scrolling all the way down the page. If you're using Mozilla, you'll have to do it this way.

In Word, select "Find and Replace" (Ctrl-H). In the "Find" field, enter ^l (that's a caret followed by a lower-case L). In the Replace field, key in a ^p. That will replace all the Line Breaks with Paragraph Breaks, which should give you the standard Word format.

 

[Singularity]

Guaranteed To Work

This is the method I use to save a story for offline reading:

Open a New word document.

On the Lit story page, use the mouse to highlight all the text on the page from the title through the last line of story text.

Do a Control-C to copy the entire story to the clipboard.

Switch to your open Word document.

DON'T do a simple Control-V paste. Instead, do a "Paste-As" and select either Formatted Text or Unformatted Text. This will take out all the page formatting. You get a slightly different look with the two methods.

Then save the document. If the title doesn't have any special characters in it, and you use Formatted Text, it automatically will default to being the title of the document.


Happy pasting....


Sin.

 

[snooper]

All the problems, vote boxes, hypertext, etc, go away (plus all the italics etc, but you can't have everything) if you copy and paste into Notepad and save as a .txt. Then that can be opened in Word and saved as .doc.

 

[minsue]

I've got nothing to add here as it seems like you've got a bunch of solutions now, so I'll just throw in a, "Good luck, Doc!" for good measure.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Thanks a lot, guys. I did a combination of what you said and it worked fine.

First I went to the story in Lit, and triple-clicked on it, then opened a Word doc and chose “Paste Special” from the Edit drop-dpwn and told it to paste it as RTF. That left with me manuel breaks at the end of each paragraph, so I did a find&replace to get rid of them, then I went and reformatted the entire document in the writing format I use, Looks absolutely pristine.

Thanks again.

---dr.M.