*radio silence broken*

[geoviki]

I must post more.
I must post more.
I must post more.
I must post more.
Gah!

What does it say that I spent more time picking out the effing icon than deciding on content (Japanese pORn stars FTW)? What happens, see, is that it's been so long between posts that I have become overwhelmed by the sheer content of what I should have posted all along; therefore, I can't even wrap my mind around what I should say at the moment.

Or whom I'm even saying it to.

I know: I'll ask a question, one that someone may even be able to help me with.

I want to post "A Thousand Beautiful Things" to the Archive of Our Own. And so I need a program that will convert a Word file to HTML. A program that isn't Word, of course, which fills the whole friggin' thing with incomprehensible and useless code. I want clean, streamlined code. My file has some italics, yeah, but what's it really has is those bloody lyrics that needs blockquotes, but without extra lines and crap.

This program should be freeware or online.

Also I may be travelling to Geneva, Switzerland, very soon. Any tips?

Comments

[dementordelta.livejournal.com]

*waves* Hey, hon--we missed you at Lubricus!

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

*waves back with hugs*

Aww, that's sweet of you to say! I decided that I'd been traveling so much that I needed to clip my wings (and tighten the purse strings) a bit, and that trip didn't happen. I did miss seeing everyone there.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

Can you pull the text file from Skyehawke (a chapter at a time)?

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

That's how I did all the short stories I managed to post over there, but for novel-length, it was proving tedious. There are some suggestions now on how to streamline the process, so off I go to try them out...

[terrio]

You might want to check out FLAG, which will let you download fic from a number of different sites, including Skyehawke, in a variety of different formats, including HTML. You may need to do a bit of cleanup, especially in the "style" section, which imposes wide margins and a blue background... but that's about 20 lines of code that can safely be deleted in about 30 seconds. (Seriously, just whack everything between <style type="text-css"> and </style> and you're golden.)

eta: forgot to mention that it will automatically download all of the chapters of a multi-part story for you and put them into a single output file.

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

Ooh, this works nicely! I can see using this to capture stuff for Kindle reading. And it put together ATBT in a snap.

Stupidly, I did all the formatting ahead of time in the Word file and was hoping to not have to re-reformat stuff but it doesn't look like anyone's got tips for converting that way.

Thanks!

[urnesha.livejournal.com]

I have zero advice on the file conversion but just seeing "A Thousand Beautiful Things" made me smile. STILL in love with that fic!

Hope you are well. :)

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

You've always been so supportive, thank you! I'm doing well (er, except for battling HTML, of course!), and hope you are doing the same.

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

I think I'll take the time and upload that puppy, then. I was wondering if it would do better. God, anything would have to do better than the conversion within Word.

Hey, what are you doing hanging around here? Don't you have a wedding to get ready for? Congrats!!! *mwaah*

[goseaward.livejournal.com]

I don't know of such a program. There are ways of doing it that are slightly more labor-intensive, though--the Word search function is pretty powerful, so you can search for things in italics, and then put <em>^&</em> in the replace box. (The ^& means "thing you found.") (I should say, test this before you do the whole document, I don't have Word and can't...)

brief tutorial and in-depth description of all possibilities.

(I feel like this should be possible to do as a macro and distribute it, but I don't know how...also, see above re: no access to Word.)

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

Don't have Word? Is that possible? *prepare to be assimilated...*

I'm getting lots of tips for conversion to HTML from where it's online now, so I'll try to get that to work. There are programs I could buy for the Word-to-HTML but it seems silly for a one-time thing.

[who_la_hoop]

Hello! ♥ My only tip for Switzerland would be to eat lots of chocolate, because, seriously... *drools* :D

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

I am practising on bars of Toblerone, hee!

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

There we go! Questions are always good silence-breakers! :D *hugs*

Geneva is French-speaking and most of the rest of Switzerland is German-speaking. People praise the cheese and chocolate but the bread is equally fabulous, even more diverse than in France. (There, I have been mostly unhelpful. ^_^ )

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

This is not unhelpful, not at all, because I didn't know that about the bread...mmmm...

I have been brushing up on my high-school French, which is going well until I get to the words that are, um, critical for the meaning of the whole sentence, at which point the brain refuses to cough up anything helpful. Merde!

[meri-oddities.livejournal.com]

I use fanfic downloader which will create an html file from your skyehawke site. If you want, I'll do it and send it to you to look at.

Have fun in Switzerland. The chocolate is divine.

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

Got it! Thanks.

Stupidly, I began the process by cleaning up all the lyric formatting in Word first, then got stymied at how to get that into clean HTML. Doesn't look like anyone's got freeware for the conversion, so I'll re-edit the HTML. Blah. Clearly I should have thought it through, but I forgot about the mess Word makes of HTML.

[parthenia14.livejournal.com]

You could copy the text to a plain text editor, as an interim step.

But these people have you covered.

PS Hello!

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

Hello back! I'm sorry, as always, that the upcoming trip doesn't bring me any nearer to you.

The copy-pasta-ing was proving time-consuming for the length of the beast. And of course it allowed for much procrastinating, as I rationalized that "certainly there has to be a better way..."

[who_la_hoop]

Hah! I like your style :D I've only been to Switzerland once, and I visited a chocolate factory. Happy memories, om nom nom!

Also, raclette! Yum! Er, I'm sure there's more to the place than food...

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

I had to Wiki 'raclette'...OMG, yum! I love melted cheese anyway, and now you tell me that the Swiss make an entire dish of it. Big thanks!

[bronze-ribbons.livejournal.com]

The Patek Philippe Museum is dazzling: http://www.patekmuseum.com/

The exhibits at CERN were kind of tired, and the tour I went on was more lecturing in front of static displays and kiosks than seeing the innards (although we did stand in front of one of the control rooms for a while), but still, for science and computing nerds, it's worth the pilgrimage. (E.g., seeing the actual computer and servers Tim Berners-Lee used, the Fiami comic books in the gift shop, the physicists who chat me up when they see my LHC jacket... :-) )

They still use Swiss francs (CHF) there (the more tourist-friendly places accept Euros, but rather grudgingly). Get coins at the airport or train station if you're planning to take public transportation. (Silly vending machines.) That said, I had a lot of fun after I bought a day pass and hopped on and off various buses whenever/wherever I felt like it. And they really do refund the difference on bus tickets at the central station if (like me) you get stuck using one of those damn machines and don't have exact change on you. (I think if you stay at a standard hotel they comp the bus passes altogether, so most tourists don't even have to deal with the ticket machines -- I didn't in Lausanne, which has a similar arrangement. [In Geneva, I was trying to save money by staying at a place I'd found via airbnb, and that turned out to be an unhappy experience. Hotels for me from now on.])

FWIW, my Geneva photo diary from last fall.

There is a Globus in Geneva. I went to its food hall after reading David Lebovitz's writeup of the one in Lausanne. Definitely yummy stuff to sample there, and looking is free. ;-) (I couldn't resist the beer with the John Calvin label, though.)

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was enormously helpful, thank you! I checked out all of the photos, too. We've got tickets to see Sonny Rollins at the Victoria Theatre, so it's nice to know what we'll be looking for (not that it's subtle or anything!).

Our hotel will give us those free bus passes, so I'll be sure to take advantage of that. Mr Geoviki will be in meetings all day for the better part of 2 weeks, so I can explore at will.

I need to run off to the library but I'm sitting on my hands so as not to start reading all of your Haru fics right now...whee! That'll be my reward after errand-doing.

[bronze-ribbons.livejournal.com]

Two weeks? Oh my -- I'll be looking forward to your photos/reports! :-D

[hpreader.livejournal.com]

Looks like you got it sorted (and I don't have any advice), but just want to say how delighted I am that you are posting to AO3.

This is one of my favorite fics. Hm, time for a re-read. Please do post the link when you get it up :)

*hugs*
Doro

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

I will post the link. I'm still dinking around with the formatting. I can't seem to make it do what I want, so I have to learn to accept what I can do...

And thanks!

[tipgardner.livejournal.com]

Nothing much to add save, "Hiya!" and have a wonderful time in Geneva.

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

Hiya! back, too.

I'm currently stalking the weather in Geneva and it's rainy and kinda cold...packing is haaaard in the wintertime!