My text submitted on a site is format corrupted, help

happyhero

Hi I have a property development going on nearby my house and my neighbours have asked me to comment on it so I went on my council website and found the right section to submit my views on the developement and filled out their online form but I am having trouble with the text I submit ie the bit where I write a few parargraphs of my own.


The first time I used Word and copied and pasted and then when I looked at it on the site it seems to have tons of formatting, mentioned all sorts of fonts and arrows I didn't even use, I kept it very basic. Its like its gone mad and added tons of extra formatting around my text so that it is difficult to read.


I know certain sites have trouble with copying in from Word so I copied it into Notepad and then copied it from there but still the same problem.


I then tried getting the text into PDF format and copied from there but got the same result, what am I doing wrong? Is it holding on to a load of formatting stuff from Word even though I kept it basic and transferred it into another program?


Its too long to rewrite so I'd prefer not to have to do that. Is there any way round this problem?


Any help appreciated.

debitcardmayhem

Don't know if it will work but try save the .doc as plain txt (not rtf) and try copying from that via notepad.

googler

Open your Word doc, select all text, copy it, then paste into a Notepad file, to be saved as plain text (*.txt). Edit it if necessary

Save that, then select all within it, and copy/paste to the online destination

[Deleted User]

Assuming you're using Windows then pasting into Notepad and re-copying from there (as you've already tried) should drop the special formatting instructions that Word carries and replace the clipboard contents with the clean text. However it's still possible that there could be some exotic characters in there.

I suggest trying an online text cleaner such as the following (note that the forum software is stripping my links due to my low post count): articleformatter.com

Just be sure to untick the "Email fix - remove word wrapping" option if you want to keep your line breaks, then press Format and copy the text from there.

SnowTiger

happyhero wrote: »

I know certain sites have trouble with copying in from Word so I copied it into Notepad and then copied it from there but still the same problem.

SHIFT-CTRL-V will (usually) paste without formatting.

Odd that formatting was retained even after copying via Notepad.

PDC

Does it paste into an email okay? You can normally contact the council and email these kind of things directly, with the right reference number - I know where you are coming from as our councils online website is troublesome to use.

pramsay13

If you right-click to paste do you get an option something like paste as plain text, or paste without formatting? If so use that and it should be fine.