If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain.
-C. S. Lewis

Many people run into a common frustration with Copy & Paste. You want to save a portion of an article, but when you paste it into Word, you end up with extra lines or multiple fonts and sizes. Or an article you have taken time to write & format in Word (or some other editor) ends up looking like garbage when you paste it into the blog tool to publish it on your website. Infuriating!

We live in an exciting time for reading and publishing*. Never before has so much material been available, and much of it digitized and available on computing devices carried in our pockets. With the use of AI, even scrolls that were charred over 2,000 years ago at the eruption of Mount Vesuvius are being digitized and read again.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-unravels-ancient-roman-scrolls-charred-by-volcano/

Typesetting has certainly advanced since the 4th century BC, but many would be surprised to learn that time-frame is the source of the Pilcrow, or the backwards P symbol used to show hidden typesetting characters in modern programs such as Microsoft Word. By viewing and sometimes deleting these hidden characters, you can gain better control of your document formatting.

Keith Houston explains the origin of the Pilcrow, space, and other common punctuation characters in his excellent 3 part series on the Pilcrow for those curious:
https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/02/the-pilcrow-part-1/

One useful skill when typing in modern editors, including Word and web tools, is to know the difference between a new line and a paragraph. I have seen a number of authors frustrated when attempting to insert a new line and getting additional spacing between lines. This is especially true for those who learned to type on typewriters and early word processors, where there was no distinction between a new line and a new paragraph.

Briefly, if you would like a new line of text, you should type [Shift] + Enter. That will not insert any extra spacing between the current line and the previous line. Enter key by itself gives a new paragraph which shows up as a Pilcrow when hidden characters are shown. A new paragraph causes extra spacing between lines to help delineate between the two paragraphs of text. Formatting rules are generally the same for all lines in a paragraph, so it is important to understand the difference for that reason also. If you enter both a new line & a new paragraph in Word, and click the Pilcrow key, you will also see the difference in the hidden or non-printing characters.

Not all programs handle text and formatting rules in the same way, so when copying & pasting text between programs (e.g. between Word & your web blog), it is generally best to remove all formatting and only paste plain text. Then you can add new formatting as required. If you Right Click to paste, you can often find an option like “Paste without Formatting” or “Paste and Match Destination Formatting”. These options will prevent lots of headaches and frustration. If you cannot find them, another option is to paste the contents into a simple text editor (e.g. Notepad on Windows, TextMate or TextEdit on MacOS), then copy the unformatted text, and then paste a second time into the ultimate destination.

Many designers feel it was a mistake to combine text and formatting in WYSIWYG editors like Word, and it would be better to separate authoring and presentation. The modern web and html is one system that separates authoring and presentation in such a way, another is a group of professional tools for authors of books and other articles called Markdown. You can find out more about Markdown in the next article in this series.

[Second article in this series coming soon.]

*For those interested in the history of computer typography, an interesting start is TeX, one of the early computer typesetting systems, and the author of that system, Dr. Donald Knuth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/