Achaea Editor!

Zuko

Hello! I often paste some of my written works from a word processor on my computer or online, into my achaea journal or letter. Then, it turns ' and " and maybe some other symbols, into ?'s. I think this is because the processor text is too fancy or modern for the Achaea editor, is there a file format I can save the word document as or something so that it will change these to match up to the editor so I dont have to go through after and change ?'s to " and 's again? Thanks... If this doesn't make sense let me know and I'll explain!

Eld

.txt?
If you're on Windows, notepad should be fine.

Keres

notepad++ is probably my favorite text-editor for windows

note: Microsoft Word is almost never a good choice for any document that is going to be exported to different systems or across environments/formats. Nothing against Microsoft (in this post) but it adds too much extraneous formatting information that other editors/programs can't understand

also, Mudlet has a built-in editor for journaling/news posts

Sena

I'm not sure what word processor you're using, but there should be an option to disable "smart quotes" or something similar. That should fix the problem.

Nim

Plain text, eg .txt files.

A list of editors that specialize in this can be found on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors), but notepad and notepad++ are probably the most popular ones I know of. (I personally use vim, but that has a bit of a learning curve, so it might be a bit too much just for Achaea editing)

The actual issue you are probably having is that you're using a word processor rather than a text editor, and word processors are designed for presentation over content control. Therefore, they prefer to use pretty unicode quotation marks over ASCII quotation marks (and this preference can extend to other symbols as well). However, Achaea is not designed for unicode, so it won't properly accept or handle unicode symbols.

Modern text editors often can handle unicode just fine too, but content control is a higher priority than presentation in a good text editor, so they typically won't use fancy unicode symbols unless you specifically input them.

Eld

Keres said:

notepad++ is probably my favorite text-editor for windows

note: Microsoft Word is almost never a good choice for any document that is going to be exported to different systems or across environments/formats. Nothing against Microsoft (in this post) but it adds too much extraneous formatting information that other editors/programs can't understand

also, Mudlet has a built-in editor for journaling/news posts

Bolded is why I went for notepad, as it was the only thing I could think of that most Windows users have that would be likely to produce anything like a plain text file. Not sure about notepad++.
Mudlet's editor is nice, but I still find it useful to compose long things in an external text editor, since I tend to get disconnected if I'm in the editor too long, which leads to losing what I've written if I don't remember to copy it to the clipboard first. That and I'm so used to vim by now that I find it painful to edit text in anything else.

Keres

@Eld - my preference is Notepad++ on Windows and Vim on Linux so I give that a thumbs-up

If you're pasting directly to Mudlet's editor then you can use whatever you want and paste as plain-text. Problem solved.

Eld

Keres said:

@Eld - my preference is Notepad++ on Windows and Vim on Linux so I give that a thumbs-up

If you're pasting directly to Mudlet's editor then you can use whatever you want and paste as plain-text. Problem solved.

Well, yeah, what else would you paste as? If you mean it strips MS formatting cruft and such, that's handy. Why not use vim on windows, too?

Keres

You can 'paste' - which (in most Windows apps) includes rich-formatting, or 'paste as plain-text' which, as you suggesting, strips all formatting.

..and because I like Notepad++ in Windows :P  Namely the plugins and how extensible it is, as well as the GUI. I don't (often) use a GUI in Linux and when I do it's usually not KDE or Gnome so I default to a line-editor. In windows, I have no need for a line-editor when I have a program that conforms to the rest of the system's interface. *shrug* I have thought about it before and even tried it, but there is nothing from Vim that I need in Windows.

Tecton

Sena said:

I'm not sure what word processor you're using, but there should be an option to disable "smart quotes" or something similar. That should fix the problem.

This is the solution in 99% of cases!

Vadimuses

Sublime Text 2 is another plaintext editor that's especially pleasant because it saves stuff without you having to save to files.

Keres

I spent some time checking out Sublime Text 2 when I got home tonight.

mind = blown

Sherazad

I use gedit on ubuntu and windows. On ubuntu, I've had something like Microsoft's One Note, it's called GNote where you don't need to save it manually too. All my files on gedit are saved on Ubuntu One so that also helps with switching machines.

I might try Sublime Text 2 tho.

Soludra

Sublime Text 2 is godly. I use it for practically everything text-related. Cannot recommend enough!

Prythe

NoteTab (Both Light and Pro) are amazing. I have been using that product for a billion years, was turned on to it when I was coding HTML by hand in the early days of the Web.

It does so many wonderful little text things - changing case, stripping coding, combining for word wrap, etc. I still use it for Achaea and just paste what I write into the Svo box when I'm good with it. (That way I also get to save every last thing I have ever written to post!)

Linian

Not the best for stripping formatting, but as far as organizing large amounts of documents in a streamlined manner (stories, hhelp or chelp files, IC books) Scrivener has always been my go-to. Granted, most of it's features that'd relate to Achaea could be done with a keen selection of folders and any other editor, but I'll always adore the corkboard/file sorting format it uses where I can instantly tree any file to any other file to put things where they're ultimately relevant. It makes planning things simple, as well as organizing them.

Kyrra

I use Scrivener for the same thing. It's helping to keep one of my pet projects incredibly organised.

Trevize

I just keep a massive amount of help files in OneNote... so messy, but I'm used to it!

Trevize

Eld said:

.txt?
If you're on Windows, notepad should be fine.

I use the basic notepad all the time at work and Achaea to paste things into, copy again, then paste somewhere else. Great way to strip all formatting/weird stuff. Pasting into excel from the internet is a pet peeve of mine, without using notepad I'd have to paste special, text, which takes so much longer when you have literally an hours worth of pasting to be doing. -_- (some of our web apps have information I need in excel sheets, like users/logins/etc)

Xli

Trevize said:

Eld said:

.txt?
If you're on Windows, notepad should be fine.

I use the basic notepad all the time at work and Achaea to paste things into, copy again, then paste somewhere else. Great way to strip all formatting/weird stuff. Pasting into excel from the internet is a pet peeve of mine, without using notepad I'd have to paste special, text, which takes so much longer when you have literally an hours worth of pasting to be doing. -_- (some of our web apps have information I need in excel sheets, like users/logins/etc)

CTRL+C then ALT P S V. I use Excel so much I rarely use a mouse on it

Trevize

Yep. It's the delay though, I don't know if it's the work machines, or excel '07, but there's a good five second delay when I do that.