Converting From Other Formats

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The format used for posts is called BBCode. It's an easy format to use if you are entering the text manually into this bulletin board. If you have an existing document in another format, unfortunately, there are no easy ways to convert to the BBCode format.

From .doc / .docx

You can load the file into Word, select all the text, and copy that and paste it into your post. You will lose all of the formatting like headings, underlines, bold, including, sometimes, the separation between paragraphs. So, after you paste the text into your post you will need to do a lot of cleanup to restore what was lost.

There is another approach. You can load the file into Word, then save it as an HTML document, the follow the instructions for converting HTML documents. This has more steps but you lose a little less formatting, but still almost all of it.

From .htm / .html

You can load the HTML document into your browser, select all the text, and copy that and paste it into your post. You will lose most of the formatting like headings, underlines, bold, including, sometimes, the separation between paragraphs. So, after you paste the text into your post you will need to do a lot of cleanup to restore what was lost.

There is another approach. You can use an online HTML to BBCode converter. I don't have one to recommend though. I've tried many of them and they were all seriously lacking. I found that I would still have to do a lot of cleanup and also some repair.

I have created a converter of my own that does a pretty good job. Be sure to check the notes at the bottom of this page. HTMLToBBCode.php

Formatting

Once the text is in the post, you will need to restore the formatting that was lost. There are buttons above the post entry field that handle the most common formatting like bold, underline, quotes, bullets, etc. They insert text like

Code: Select all

[u][/u]

into your post that will be converted later and you can view in the preview.

There are some others you can type in manually.

Superscript:

Code: Select all

[sup][/sup]

Yellow highlight:

Code: Select all

[highlight][/highlight]

Image with style:

Code: Select all

[imgs=style]ImageURL[/imgs]

Pull quote floating right:

Code: Select all

[divblock]Text[/divblock]

Line break (forced):

Code: Select all

[linebreak]