Alas, I don’t 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 “Why the tails come apart” 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 I’ve 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 don’t 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 that’s 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 don’t want because they break on smaller devices). So if you ever discover any document that you can‘t just copy paste, please send a bug report and I think we can likely make it work.
Alas, I don’t 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 “Why the tails come apart” 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 I’ve 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 don’t 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 that’s 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 don’t want because they break on smaller devices). So if you ever discover any document that you can‘t just copy paste, please send a bug report and I think we can likely make it work.
+1 for internal links