Yuck! What's all of this gibberish in my post?

You have just spent the last half-hour crafting a brilliant and helpful story to share with friends, fellow FatAsses and folks out there in Internet land. 

You cut text from one website or another, maybe you got it from an email note or a Word document?  You pasted it all together on the CFA site, formatted it nicely, checked your spelling and pressed save.  Voila.

To your horror, your opus is full of weird formatting, weird text (e.g. <span>, <end if>) and other weird stuff. "Crappy website!," you holler in frustration.

You have stumbled across one of those technology things that we just have to work around.  You see, word processors, email programs and other computer programs that manage words and images have all kids of hidden codes.  When you paste information from these programs into a web editor such as ours, the hidden code comes along for the ride.  You can either make sure there is no hidden code in what you post to this website, or you can clean out the hidden code from your post on this website.

  1. Cut and Paste from Word.  If your original document is a Word document, best to use our editor's handy "Paste from Word" tool.  To do this, copy your content from the Word document.  Go to the post on our website where you would like to paste the text.  Place your cursor at the exact paste location.  Look for the Word icon (a folder with a blue "W" in the text editor toolbar above.  Click on the Word icon.  A "Paste from Word" window will will open up.  Paste your text here and press ok. 
  2. PreWash.  A hassle, but certainly the easiest way to get rid of hidden code in your posts on this site is to make sure it never gets into your posts on this site in the first place.  Hidden code is automatically stripped out by a simple text editor such as Wordpad.  You then paste to the CFA site
  3. After the fact.  Edit your post as you normally would.  There is two ways to strip additional formatting:
    - use the handy "Remove Format" tool in our text editor above.  Highlight the text where you'd like to remove formatting, look for the "remove format: tool in the text editor (note: it looks like an eraser).  Click on the "remove format" icon.  If you still see some funky code or formatting use the next option:
    - Below the editor, you will see "Switch to plain text editor".  This will take you below the hood to the HTML editor where you can strip out the invisible code.  Warning... requires some knowledge of HTML!