Ok…just for the record…nothing earth shattering here, but…cutting and pasting from MS Word…bad. Cutting and pasting from Wordpad/Notepad…good.
Ed my tech guy says giving kids access to Wordpad is no problem. So it looks like the solution is if students have posts that they have created in Word, they must first save them as text only files, then open them in Wordpad or Notepad, and then copy and paste into Manila. A bit cumbersome, but a workable solution for now.
Ironic thing is I downloaded and installed Microsoft’s own plug-in to clean the HTML and it didn’t work either. Even though the option to “Export to Compact HTML” appears, it gives me an error every time: “Compile Error in Hidden Module”. Uh, yeah, I can figure that one out…
Will,
I do not use Word all that often, and haven’t been paying attention to this topic, but perhaps we can do a filter on the posted text to take care of this on the server side. Email me if you want to help me understand the problem.
Sam D
If you have them typing in word and copying and pasting, have them turn smart quotes off in word.
If you want to use a plain text editor (which is probably a good way to go) you should check out notetab light (free download from http://www.notetab.com ) which allows you to work in plain text and can even be made to upload things automatically using clip language which is included with it. This is much better than notepad because you can have more than one document open, the pro version has a spell checker (about $20 I think), and you can add simple html tags if that is desired.
Don