Option to upload .doc/.rtf/.etc files instead

Feature Requests
1

I’ll begin this by admitting I don’t know hardly anything at all about coding, neither back nor front-end, but because of that I recognize how it can be devilishly hard to incorporate new features that might to others seem innocuous (and vice-versa, something the layman might assume would be horrendously difficult is a quick couple of lines and a push). So with that said I wanted to make clear that I have no idea if this idea is a feasible one, but I think it’s important enough to at least broach the topic.

In short: I feel like it would be a good idea to consider implementing a system of story-uploading where rather than working within or copy-pasting your work into the current upload word editor, an author could upload a simple document file and not need to worry so much about re-formatting. I know for me the big frustration as I’ve been learning on how to use the story upload feature is that I work in Scrivener or Google Docs, and trying to copy over my work to GSS from either of those is a gigantic hassle due to the way that GSS’ markdown editor is handled. Paragraph breaks don’t align or get recognized; indentation disappears; italicized or otherwise styled formats need to be manually hunted down and re-added; the list goes on.

I’m sure that many folks probably like the current word editor within the upload section as it is, but I’m sure plenty of us would also at least like to see if there’s the option instead for a direct-upload scenario instead in order to keep formatting as intended, or at least make it less of a mess and a pain to try and reformat within the site editor afterward.

2

I’m sorry that you’re struggling with the editor.

Markdown is a simple format that works universally - not only on this site.

I don’t think that it would be a good idea to use a proprietary format like .doc or .rtf. It might work for you, but not for the majority of other people.

I’d recommend writing your stories with a very simple text editor, maybe even the editor of the site itself. That way you don’t have any conversion hassles.

But if you already have .rtf files you want to import, I’d recommend using an online service like this one: Online RTF to MD Converter | Free GroupDocs Apps. This is just one example, there are others as well.

In the end, I had to decide for one single format that’s used for all stories on the site, a format that’s simple to use, is not proprietary, can be used by anyone, works for plain text as well and doesn’t open up any security issues. There are only very few formats that combine all of these requirements, and markdown has become somewhat of a universal standard - for a reason.

1 Like
3

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

4

There’s also Writage, which saves as Markdown directly from Word. The only problem I’ve found with it is that it’s a little buggy on the save. At least for me, it doesn’t save, and you have to go into Advanced Options to get it to work. From there, it saves fine.

1 Like