Embellishing Text from Excel

[Tim Lodge]

The discussion in the GRA defs thread about ordered lists exported from Excel and the difficulty of bringing across italics and emboldening made me wonder whether using Markdown would work in Google Groups.  This is really a test to see if it does.

_Italics_ are marked using underscores.  **Bold text** is marked with pairs of asterisks.

Here is Paul's def from the last round:

in _singular_ and _plural_. Frequently with _the_. A fit of depression, _esp_. one caused by a hangover (chiefly _S. Afr_.). Often in _**the dreaded woofits**_. Also, formerly: a type of dance.

I just want to see how it appears, both on the Group website and in email.

--  Tim L

On Sunday, September 13, 2020 at 7:17:21 PM UTC+1, Efrem G Mallach wrote:You're right, Paul. Italics have to be put back by hand. I generally have few enough of those, often zero, that it doesn't create a problem in practice.

I have not had, or seen, any of the other problems you  describe. Having a hard-coded number in the def shouldn't affect wrapping. It's true that HTML lists indent nicely, but I haven't seen lack of indent after the first line become a problem either.

Anyhow, whatever works for a given dealer, yourself included, is fine with me! I'd rather cope with an HTML list than deal! And I appreciate your calling attention to the list formatting. Some other people have also used lists, but left it to each player to discover that.

Efrem

On Sep 13, 2020, at 1:10 PM, Paul Keating <kea...@acm.org> wrote:

Efrem,

The problem with constructing the list with a spreadsheet is that things like italicized labels don't survive the concatenation process. For example, in Excel, this set of cells (with formula showing):

<int_1.png>

yields this result:

<int_2.png>

The problem is that the italics are achieved by hidden markup attached to the cell, not to the data, and disappear when you use the cell value in a formula.

That is Excel, but Google Sheets works the same way (as I discovered today). Despite considerable progress since the last time I tried it (before round 746), I think spreadsheets are still a poor fit for the admin of dealing a round.

I'm in any case far from convinced that defeating the numbered-list functionality is a good thing. List format ensures clean, legible indentation on small screens, by folding back long lines under a hanging indent. Forcing a hard coded number does not. I lost track of the number of deadlines I missed after postponing voting until I could get to a desktop, because the announcement had been explicitly formatted for a 72-character display with spaces and line-breaks, and appeared on a small screen as an unreadable wodge of text with random waterfalls of whitespace.

But I never complained about that, even though I thought my inconvenience was at least as much as having to press 3 extra keys after a cut and paste operation.

P

[Tim Lodge]

Well, nothing happens when viewed on the Group website - I just see the underscores and asterisks.  Perhaps some of you who play by email would tell me whether it appears differently there.

--  Tim l

[Tim B]

>
> _Italics_ are marked using underscores.  **Bold text** is marked with pairs of asterisks.

Nothing happens by email.

> Well, nothing happens when viewed on the Group website - I just see the underscores and asterisks. Perhaps some of you who play by email would tell me whether it appears differently there.

No, I'm afraid not.

Best wishes,
Tim Bourne.

[Tim Lodge]

Thanks, Tim

It was a nice thought, but it clearly isn't going to work!

--  Tim L

[Paul Keating]

Tim,

Not in my mail client either. It just displays the HTML that it gets.

Anyhow, it would be more of a hassle to translate italics into underscores so that some software could convert them back to italics again. That only moves the problem.

Regards

--
Paul Keating
Soustons, Nouvelle Aquitaine, France

2020-09-14 13:02