Import from HTML/âgdoc/âword/âwhatever: One feature I miss from the old forum was the ability to submit HTML directly. This allowed one to write the post in google docs or similar (with tables, footnotes, sub/âsuperscript, special characters, etc.), export it as HTML, paste into the old editor, and it was (with some tweaks) good to go.
This is how I posted my epistemic modesty piece (which has a table which survived the migration, although the footnote links no longer work). In contrast, when cross-posting it to LW2, I needed the kind help of a moderatorâand even they needed to make some adjustments (e.g. âwriting outâ the table).
Given such a feature was available before, hopefully it can be done again. It would be particularly valuable for the EA forum as:
A fair proportion of posts here are longer documents which benefit from the features available in things like word or gdocs. (But typically less mathematics than LW, so the nifty LATEX editor finds less value here than there).
The current editor has much less functionality than word/âgdocs, and catching up âmost of the wayâ seems very labour intensive and could take a while.
Most users are more familiar with gdocs/âword than editor/âmarkdown/âlatex (i.e. although I can add Ί and other special characters with the Latex editor and a some googling, Iâm more familiar with doing this in gdocsâand I guess folks who have less experience with Latex or using a command line would find this difference greater).
Most users are probably drafting longer posts on google docs anyway.
Clunkily re-typesetting long documents in the forum editor manually (e.g. tables as image files) poses a barrier to entry, and so encourages linking rather than posting, with (I guess?) less engagement.
A direct âimport from gdoc/âword/âetc.â would be even better, but an HTML import function alone (given software which has both wordprocessing and HTML export âsortedâ are prevalent) would solve a lot of these problems at a stroke.
Alas, I donât think this is possible in the way you are suggesting it here. We can allow submission of a narrow subset of HTML, but indeed one of the single most common complaints that we got on the old forum was many posts having totally inconsistent formatting because people were submitting all kinds of weird HTML+CSS with differing font-sizes for each post, broken formatting on smaller devices, inconsistent text colors, garish formatting, floating images that broke text layout, etc.
Indeed just a week ago I got a bug report about the formatting of your old âWhy the tails come apartâ post being broken on smaller devices because of the custom HTML you submitted at the time. Indeed a very large fraction of old LW and EA Forum posts have broken formatting because of the overly permissible editor that old LessWrong and the old EA Forum both had (and Iâve probably spent at least 10 hours over the last years fixing posts with that kind of broken formatting).
If you want to import something from Google Docs, then exporting it to markdown and using the markdown editor is really as well as we can do, and we can ensure that always works reliably. I donât think we can make arbitrary HTML submission work without frustrating tons of readers and authors.
I have also been working a lot on making the new editor work completely seamlessly with Google Docs copy-paste (and indeed there is a lot of special casing to specifically make copy-paste from Google Docs work). The only feature thatâs missing and kind of difficult to do is internal links and footnotes, but I have not discovered any other feature that has been running into significant problems (that we would want, there are some others like left or right floating images that we donât want because they break on smaller devices). So if you ever discover any document that you canât just copy paste, please send a bug report and I think we can likely make it work.
Import from HTML/âgdoc/âword/âwhatever: One feature I miss from the old forum was the ability to submit HTML directly. This allowed one to write the post in google docs or similar (with tables, footnotes, sub/âsuperscript, special characters, etc.), export it as HTML, paste into the old editor, and it was (with some tweaks) good to go.
This is how I posted my epistemic modesty piece (which has a table which survived the migration, although the footnote links no longer work). In contrast, when cross-posting it to LW2, I needed the kind help of a moderatorâand even they needed to make some adjustments (e.g. âwriting outâ the table).
Given such a feature was available before, hopefully it can be done again. It would be particularly valuable for the EA forum as:
A fair proportion of posts here are longer documents which benefit from the features available in things like word or gdocs. (But typically less mathematics than LW, so the nifty LATEX editor finds less value here than there).
The current editor has much less functionality than word/âgdocs, and catching up âmost of the wayâ seems very labour intensive and could take a while.
Most users are more familiar with gdocs/âword than editor/âmarkdown/âlatex (i.e. although I can add Ί and other special characters with the Latex editor and a some googling, Iâm more familiar with doing this in gdocsâand I guess folks who have less experience with Latex or using a command line would find this difference greater).
Most users are probably drafting longer posts on google docs anyway.
Clunkily re-typesetting long documents in the forum editor manually (e.g. tables as image files) poses a barrier to entry, and so encourages linking rather than posting, with (I guess?) less engagement.
A direct âimport from gdoc/âword/âetc.â would be even better, but an HTML import function alone (given software which has both wordprocessing and HTML export âsortedâ are prevalent) would solve a lot of these problems at a stroke.
Alas, I donât think this is possible in the way you are suggesting it here. We can allow submission of a narrow subset of HTML, but indeed one of the single most common complaints that we got on the old forum was many posts having totally inconsistent formatting because people were submitting all kinds of weird HTML+CSS with differing font-sizes for each post, broken formatting on smaller devices, inconsistent text colors, garish formatting, floating images that broke text layout, etc.
Indeed just a week ago I got a bug report about the formatting of your old âWhy the tails come apartâ post being broken on smaller devices because of the custom HTML you submitted at the time. Indeed a very large fraction of old LW and EA Forum posts have broken formatting because of the overly permissible editor that old LessWrong and the old EA Forum both had (and Iâve probably spent at least 10 hours over the last years fixing posts with that kind of broken formatting).
If you want to import something from Google Docs, then exporting it to markdown and using the markdown editor is really as well as we can do, and we can ensure that always works reliably. I donât think we can make arbitrary HTML submission work without frustrating tons of readers and authors.
I have also been working a lot on making the new editor work completely seamlessly with Google Docs copy-paste (and indeed there is a lot of special casing to specifically make copy-paste from Google Docs work). The only feature thatâs missing and kind of difficult to do is internal links and footnotes, but I have not discovered any other feature that has been running into significant problems (that we would want, there are some others like left or right floating images that we donât want because they break on smaller devices). So if you ever discover any document that you canât just copy paste, please send a bug report and I think we can likely make it work.
+1 for internal links