Sunday, January 15, 2012

HASA How-tos - January 2012

How do I...

... convert line breaks in older stories?

This month we look at how to convert line breaks in older stories where the paragraphs are 'broken'. If you are an author who posted stories on HASA in 2005 or earlier, this How-To may be just the fix for your stories.

What is converting line breaks?

Some older stories, specifically ones posted between April 2004 and June 2005, lost their paragraph formatting as a result of a site upgrade interfering with these older pages. Up to now, the only way to fix these stories was manually. Either the author had to find her old chapters in a word processing document and repost them, or else she had to open up the chapters online and insert line breaks one by one.

Now, however, you have a one-click fix for missing line breaks in any of your stories that are affected:

  1. Go to My Stuff/My Stories to find a story that is affected.
  2. Open a chapter in that story
  3. Click the “Convert Line Breaks” button

The conversion page will show you:

  • How your chapter should look with line breaks
  • How HASA readers currently see it (Ugly! Unreadable!)

This lets you review your changes on a chapter by chapter basis. Click the “Convert Chapter” button to fix the chapter. That’s it! You can do more editing on it with the regular editor afterwards in case it stuck in a few too many lines. Be sure to take advantage of the newest in-page editor to put in the special formatting that was too much trouble to do six (or more) years ago on the Web.

If there is any topic you'd like to see in the how-to, please let us know!

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