I love Microsoft Word, but when I cut and pasted that excerpt from MAROONED into Ecto and published, I noticed a huge blank gap at the beginning of the quoted passage. When I looked in Ecto’s raw text editor to see what was the matter, I found 336 lines of gunk injected by Microsoft Word … a massive amount of non printable goop like this:
<!–[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Revision>0</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>246</o:Words>
<o:Characters>1183</o:Characters>
<o:Company>Xivagent Scientific Consulting</o:Company>
<o:Lines>18</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>11</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>1418</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>14.0</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
</xml><![endif]–>
<!–[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
…
This is apparently XML text which captures the formatting of the Word document that it came from, somehow pasted into the HTML document. As you may or may not be able to see from the screenshot above, but should definitely be able to see in the bolded parts of what I quoted above, for 1183 bytes of text Word injected 17,961 bytes of formatting. 300+ lines for 200+ words. Oy, vey. All I wanted was an excerpt without having to go manually recreate all my line breaks …
I understand this lets you paste complex formatting between programs, I get that, and actually the problem might be Ecto taking too much rather than Word giving too much. Or perhaps it’s just a mismatch of specifications. But I know HTML, Word, Ecto, and many other blogging platforms like Ecto. What is someone who doesn’t know all that supposed to do? Just suffer when their application programs get all weird on them and they don’t know why?
Sigh. I’m not really complaining here, but it’s just amusing, after a fashion.
-Anthony
