Going mad?

Headphones

Chaps,
   I've been trying to do a little pedal build thread  here.

  The first few entires were fine; I wrote them in Word, then pasted them in and all was Ok.  Then it stopped working, with a bizarre error message, showing a blank post if I managed to get to te submit button.  Assuming this was down to Word I've pasted, saved and re opened in MS Notepad, to be sure it's simple text - still with no joy.

Help!!

TTony

@Headphones

No, you're not going mad.

The problem arises because

a) the text editor imposes a limit on the number of characters that you can enter into a single post 

b) Word includes a whole load of hiddden formatting information (which are "characters" from the text editors perspective".

Hence, even though you can only see 1,000 characters (I'm guessing that's from a Word character-count?), the text editor sees many, many more characters, and your post is then over the limit and gets rejected.

You can see some of those Word hidden characters if you look at the "show source" view.  Click the <> symbol on the toolbar.

I've deleted the various blank posts in your thread.

[edit]

For example, I've copied & pasted below some of the hidden content from one of your blank posts.  It wasn't blank at all from the text editor's perspective!

TTony

<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>

 <w:WordDocument>

  <w:View>Normal</w:View>

  <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>

  <w:PunctuationKerning></w:PunctuationKerning>

  <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas></w:ValidateAgainstSchemas>

  <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>

  <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>

  <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>

 

Headphones

TTony, thanks for the clean up and advice.

I've just posted successfully.  I copied straight from NotePad as I did last night without success (having guessed at your solution), but it didn't work then, posting the blanks.  Was there draft text hidden somewhere or some such?

monquixote

Essentially MS Word is evil.

TTony

Essential MS Word is a hugely powerful, pro-standard WP package that gets mis-used and misunderstood

monquixote

We may have to agree to disagree on that one. 

It's been largely eradicated where I work and all the better for it.