I’ve never seen a posting that had any good reason to change the body text style in any way. It’s as if people are preparing their posts in a styled text editor and then just pasting it in without regard for whether it matches the site style, and perhaps without even any conception of what I’m talking about.
Tip: If you’re typing your text directly into the posting box, ignore all of the formatting controls, except when you need the occasional heading, italicised word, or hyperlink. If you’re typing it into a separate text editor first, use an unstyled text editor, not Word. Paste it into the posting box. Then, and only if necessary, format the occasional italicised word etc. Never change the style of the whole text. It doesn’t matter what you think “looks better”. In all cases, what looks best is for it to match the style of every other posting.
If you think your post really is an exception to this rule, here’s a simple test to see if it is: roll a standard 6-sided die. If it comes up 7, go ahead and set it in 72-point Curlicue Cats.
I don’t have a good excuse (not even “not knowing better”). I did it on a whim on the first post, and nobody complained until now so I kept doing it for this sequence. Fixing it is going to be a pain so I’m probably not going to unless at least one more person insists.
Straight text editors were just as annoying as Word was (this surprised me). The only thing I found that I could paste directly into without having to spend 10-15 minutes reformatting everything was google docs. I don’t know what to make of Vaniver and Nornagest’s opposite issues—I’ve looked at articles I posted via this method (with the default googleDoc font instead of the weird one I used in the ritual sequence) on several different computers and it worked fine.
If you don’t mind typing a bit of markup, I suggest you use a preprocessor like Markdown. Write in “plain text” (Markdown looks mostly like e-mails), convert it to html, then paste the result through the “HTML source” button.
If you don’t mind a bit of markup, that may suit you.
Now for a plain text editor that doesn’t suck, I don’t know what to promote. I personally love Emacs, if only because you can install a Markdown mode that highlight your headers and slants your emphasises, but my love is partly due to my heavily customized key-bindings (the default ones are often clumsy). Overall, use anything but Windows’ Notepad.
I’ve never seen a posting that had any good reason to change the body text style in any way. It’s as if people are preparing their posts in a styled text editor and then just pasting it in without regard for whether it matches the site style, and perhaps without even any conception of what I’m talking about.
Tip: If you’re typing your text directly into the posting box, ignore all of the formatting controls, except when you need the occasional heading, italicised word, or hyperlink. If you’re typing it into a separate text editor first, use an unstyled text editor, not Word. Paste it into the posting box. Then, and only if necessary, format the occasional italicised word etc. Never change the style of the whole text. It doesn’t matter what you think “looks better”. In all cases, what looks best is for it to match the style of every other posting.
If you think your post really is an exception to this rule, here’s a simple test to see if it is: roll a standard 6-sided die. If it comes up 7, go ahead and set it in 72-point Curlicue Cats.
I don’t have a good excuse (not even “not knowing better”). I did it on a whim on the first post, and nobody complained until now so I kept doing it for this sequence. Fixing it is going to be a pain so I’m probably not going to unless at least one more person insists.
Straight text editors were just as annoying as Word was (this surprised me). The only thing I found that I could paste directly into without having to spend 10-15 minutes reformatting everything was google docs. I don’t know what to make of Vaniver and Nornagest’s opposite issues—I’ve looked at articles I posted via this method (with the default googleDoc font instead of the weird one I used in the ritual sequence) on several different computers and it worked fine.
If you don’t mind typing a bit of markup, I suggest you use a preprocessor like Markdown. Write in “plain text” (Markdown looks mostly like e-mails), convert it to html, then paste the result through the “HTML source” button.
If you don’t mind a bit of markup, that may suit you.
Now for a plain text editor that doesn’t suck, I don’t know what to promote. I personally love Emacs, if only because you can install a Markdown mode that highlight your headers and slants your emphasises, but my love is partly due to my heavily customized key-bindings (the default ones are often clumsy). Overall, use anything but Windows’ Notepad.