My frustration centered around not being able to take a post I’d written in google docs and simply paste it into the forum to post without extra work. I’ve run into two problems trying to do that: pictures and footnotes. It didn’t help matters that I wrote a post with a ton of footnotes before they became supported, but even now that they are it’s a pain to use the markup editor instead of just copy/pasting things. I’d strongly prefer to get this and the search functionality taken care of before adding new functionality (e.g. sequences).
There are also things I like about the new forum. The notifications about replies is a huge plus, and the question and link post types are a clever nudge to engage people. I’m sort of on the fence about the frontpage/community distinction. I sympathize with the intention, but worry that it buries time sensitive news that EAs need to know about (e.g. when a grant application window opens).
Last but definitely not least, thanks Ben for your openness to feedback (even if some is critical) and lack of defensiveness! Strong upvote.
With regards to images, I get flawless behaviour when I copy-paste from googledocs. Somehow, the images automatically get converted, and link to the images hosted with google (in the editor only visible as small cameras). Maybe you can get the same behaviour by making your docs public?
Actually, I’ll test copying an image from a google doc into this comment: (edit: seems to be working!)
Testing a reply with an image copy/pasted from a public google doc (shows up as camera in the editor)
Edit: it worked! Good to know about this workaround (though the direct google doc import Ben mentioned would still be preferable since it’d deal with footnotes too).
Gotcha. Not being able to easily copy-in from G-Docs and fotnotes+pictures being lotsa work.
Chatting with the team, their sense is that copy-pasting footnotes is very unlikely to ever work between editors (e.g. I don’t expect footnotes to be copied functionally into MS word, Dropbox paper, or any other editor you might use). If that’s the case, I would like to build the ability to do a direct import from g-docs, which would solve these problems.
Also agree with the images. The big thing we don’t do right now is host images, which means you have to upload them to the internet yourself then put the URL into our editor.
The current state of the plan is to do a big overhaul of the editor framework either this quarter or next, where I expect us to spend time on these issues and others. In general we found that making small edits to the current editor for things like this were too costly in both the short and long run, and we’d also prefer an editor a bit more like google docs in a bunch of ways.
Just adding something here: I had done all my images and footnotes well and then switched back and forth between editors, which somehow messed it all up and I had to manually insert all footnotes again.
My frustration centered around not being able to take a post I’d written in google docs and simply paste it into the forum to post without extra work. I’ve run into two problems trying to do that: pictures and footnotes. It didn’t help matters that I wrote a post with a ton of footnotes before they became supported, but even now that they are it’s a pain to use the markup editor instead of just copy/pasting things. I’d strongly prefer to get this and the search functionality taken care of before adding new functionality (e.g. sequences).
There are also things I like about the new forum. The notifications about replies is a huge plus, and the question and link post types are a clever nudge to engage people. I’m sort of on the fence about the frontpage/community distinction. I sympathize with the intention, but worry that it buries time sensitive news that EAs need to know about (e.g. when a grant application window opens).
Last but definitely not least, thanks Ben for your openness to feedback (even if some is critical) and lack of defensiveness! Strong upvote.
With regards to images, I get flawless behaviour when I copy-paste from googledocs. Somehow, the images automatically get converted, and link to the images hosted with google (in the editor only visible as small cameras). Maybe you can get the same behaviour by making your docs public?
Actually, I’ll test copying an image from a google doc into this comment: (edit: seems to be working!)
Testing a reply with an image copy/pasted from a public google doc (shows up as camera in the editor)
Edit: it worked! Good to know about this workaround (though the direct google doc import Ben mentioned would still be preferable since it’d deal with footnotes too).
btw, I had to google what a markdown editor was so perhaps the instructions could be made more accessible to laypeople
A year ago I did write a little editor guide, but many parts of it quickly went out of date. I’ll post to the Forum if I update it.
Edit: I updated it.
Gotcha. Not being able to easily copy-in from G-Docs and fotnotes+pictures being lotsa work.
Chatting with the team, their sense is that copy-pasting footnotes is very unlikely to ever work between editors (e.g. I don’t expect footnotes to be copied functionally into MS word, Dropbox paper, or any other editor you might use). If that’s the case, I would like to build the ability to do a direct import from g-docs, which would solve these problems.
Also agree with the images. The big thing we don’t do right now is host images, which means you have to upload them to the internet yourself then put the URL into our editor.
The current state of the plan is to do a big overhaul of the editor framework either this quarter or next, where I expect us to spend time on these issues and others. In general we found that making small edits to the current editor for things like this were too costly in both the short and long run, and we’d also prefer an editor a bit more like google docs in a bunch of ways.
Just adding something here: I had done all my images and footnotes well and then switched back and forth between editors, which somehow messed it all up and I had to manually insert all footnotes again.
Cool, direct import from g-docs would do the trick from my perspective. Thanks for the update!