I hate formatting

[ladymercury_10]

Comments

[eve11]

Ugh. I do my stories in TextEdit for the Mac. I don't put in the HTML for line breaks but I do use html tags for italics. And the WIP-o-Doom has tables. Which I recently realized that, when they aren't in my nice lj format, may squish the numbers together because they fill the cells right to the edge. This displeases me.

I'm not sold yet on the new cut tags. On the one hand it's nice to click a cut and be taken to the page. On the other it streamlines flist reading.

I have some private posts that are the most recent version of the WIP-o-Doom--so that, in light of above HTML tables I can still easily get word counts for the whole thing. Except it doesn't all fit on one post. It takes up 4 posts. I had them back-dated chronologically, but with the new cuts, actually it's easier to do them reverse chronologically. Then I can just type the tag for my one-shot post of them and expand them and voila, easy cut&paste, in order on the page.

[ladymercury_10]

I don't know if I can use TextEdit--I'm on a PC? I used to just put in the italics tags after the fact. But because I didn't like LJ preserving all Word's default font and line spacing options, I had to paste it all somewhere else to clear the formatting, put in the tags, and then paste it again, possibly having to put the spaces back manually (usually just by hitting return, not with the p tag). But I always mess up my paragraphs when I do that, and I messed them up even worse this time when I tried p tagging everything instead. *bangs head on wall*

What exactly is a table? I think part of my problem is that most of my knowledge of HTML comes from the day last year when I was bored at my internship and worked through like 6 chapters of HTML tutorials online. But I definitely quit before the tables chapter.

[eve11]

TextEdit is closest to WordPad I think. I always used WordPad or NotePad when I wrote stories on my PC.

Tables are just putting things in basic tabular format. So eg in my story file, part 3 starts out looking like this:

Response perception: location
Blocking variables: electromagnetic fields
Confounding mapped vectors: aural, visual, tactile
Total Observations: 150

Exploratory Analysis:
Response perception: location
Blocking variables: electromagnetic fields
Confounding mapped vectors: aural, visual, tactile
Total Observations: 150

Exploratory Analysis:
Variable Estimate StdErr T Pr(>|t|)
Intercept 12.4504.050 3.074 0.003
distance (m) 0.132 0.233 0.567 0.572
flux (T) -4.431 3.764 -1.178 0.241
charge (C) 6.350 3.890 1.632 0.105
ANOVA:
Source DF SS MSFPr(>|f|)
Regression 3 1038.4 346.1 0.954 0.595
Residual Error 146 79982.2 547.8
Total 149 81020.6

And lj comments tell me that my original post is too long so I will continue this reply in the next comment:

[eve11]

Which when marked up in lj looks like this:

Response perception: location
Blocking variables: electromagnetic fields
Confounding mapped vectors: aural, visual, tactile
Total Observations: 150

Exploratory Analysis:
Variable Estimate StdErr T Pr(>|t|)
Intercept 12.4504.050 3.074 0.003
distance (m) 0.132 0.233 0.567 0.572
flux (T) -4.431 3.764 -1.178 0.241
charge (C) 6.350 3.890 1.632 0.105
ANOVA:
Source DF SS MSFPr(>|f|)
Regression 3 1038.4 346.1 0.954 0.595
Residual Error 146 79982.2 547.8
Total 149 81020.6 (Also it reminds me to change the Pr(>|f|) to Pr(>f) since F-statistics are always non-negative

[giallarhorn]

I tend to do most of my post in html, mostly just because I don't trust LJ to not mistranslate something. Especially when it comes to spacing, and trying to get things from Word to LJ. I've mostly found it easier to copy-paste from Word into a html post, and then formatting it by hand from there. Which is really time consuming, but otherwise it's really hard to get the spacing to stick.

You could also try writing it in a txt file and format it as you write it, but that's also really aggravating. A good method of practice would be to use LaTex, but it takes forever to actually write anything in that because you have to format everything yourself.

Haha, I've always felt like html is like learning a new language- eventually, you just pick up enough of it to figure out what it looks like when posted.

[ladymercury_10]

Yeah, I usually end up doing some variation of typing up in Word, putting in the tags in manually, and then posting with the HTML editor, although usually I can get it to preserve the formatting for the spacing without having to tag that.

People write non-math things in LaTex? I thought that was mostly for mathematical typsetting. Like if you were writing up a long proof with a lot of notation in it.

The problem isn't even really that I don't understand HTML. I mean, I don't know very much, but more often what goes wrong is that I just leave off a tag somewhere crucial out of carelessness and then my paragraphs get sloppy. Gah.

[giallarhorn]

LaTex is pretty popular in the scientific writing area since it tends to be one of the best ways to actually readily format a paper for publication- a lot of journals have hyper specific formatting regulations that you have to follow, and sometimes it's just easier to work from a clean slate than reconfigure Word. And that there's a lot of arguments over which file format should be used, where formatting can be lost in translating files, etc and etc so they turned to LaTex.

Haha, yeah. Coding and CS and programming in general is a study in scrutiny and never ever ever rushing things.

[ladymercury_10]

Oh, I didn't realize it was popular in the scientific community at large. That's neat!

Yeah, I guess I expect that when I'm programming, but then it'll crash if I do something wrong and I'll know. If it's HTML, it can go wrong in more subtle ways and I might not even notice until later.

[lonewytch]

I feel your pain. I bloody hate it when i post and then have to edit edit edit over and over again. I stopped using Dreamwidth, because the formatting transferring from there to LJ was just a joke.

[ladymercury_10]

The thing that's really annoying about it is that the reason LJ is so impossible to format in properly is because they've made its formatting preservation work too well. Like, I can't just paste into the rich text editor because it'll keep my font choices and whether I've single or double or 1.15 spaced or whatever and I really don't want any of that, ergo the need to go to HTML in the first place....

[lady_with_cats]

I'm pretty much used to writing in html by default at this point.

[ladymercury_10]

I should be almost decent at it by now, but I always seem to either skip a line or hit the same line twice or SOMETHING and manage to screw up the formatting. :|