Export content for WordPress

Good afternoon, fellow forum dwellers. Smile

My website is built using WordPress. I'd like to share notes I take in Logos by posting them to my site, but it hasn't gone so well. None of the export options has given me good results - by the time I preview my post in WordPress, I've either lost most of my formatting (including the note color icons, text formatting, and any links I created), or the formatting appears quite different from the original notes, and really isn't usable without significant manual editing. Even exporting to HTML doesn't help, because the HTML that's generated appears to be intended to be a freestanding page with its own styles, and not as a portion of a larger page.

Has anyone found a satisfactory way of doing this?

And if not, do you suppose Logos might be inclined to modify the export menu to accommodate this use? Really, what's needed is an option to generate an HTML snippet (not a complete page) that calls the site's existing stylesheet, or that does its formatting using simple HTML tags.

WordPress is a pretty dominant platform, and it would be great to have an easy way to publish notes, clippings, or other Logos documents to a WordPress blog. It seems as though an "HTML Snippet" export option could also be used in many other blogging/forum applications online, including this forum!

Thanks for your thoughts on this, folks. We're all blessed to have such a solid, helpful user community!

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Comments

David Paul

I have a WordPress website as well. By my experience, I would suggest that the problem is more with WP than it is with Logos. In some respects, WP seems to have limited word processing abilities. For instance, on my site, a hard-carriage return automatically creates a double-space. Quite annoying.

One suggestion I have may help you. You might be able to take a screen shot of the notes you have created and then upload to your WP page.

Rosie Perera

Really, what's needed is an option to generate an HTML snippet (not a complete page) that calls the site's existing stylesheet, or that does its formatting using simple HTML tags.

You could paste into Word and then save as HTML, though Word is notorious for generating really ugly bogged-down HTML code. (For example, it turned a one-line excerpt from Logos with one italicized word in the middle of it into a 451 line HTML file!) But it should at least display OK in WordPress.

One trick for stripping out all the unnecessary HTML garbage is, once you've pasted into Word, select that text in Word, copy, then come here to the Logos forum, start a post as if you're going to post (though you won't really post it), click the "Paste from Word" icon, paste, click Insert, then click the HTML icon in the forum post editor, copy the code from there, and paste into WordPress. This method produces pretty clean HTML.

Tobias Lampert

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/232434#Comment_232434

You could paste into Word and then save as HTML, though Word is notorious for generating really ugly bogged-down HTML code. (For example, it turned a one-line excerpt from Logos with one italicized word in the middle of it into a 451 line HTML file!) But it should at least display OK in WordPress.

One trick for stripping out all the unnecessary HTML garbage is, once you've pasted into Word, select that text in Word, copy, then come here to the Logos forum, start a post as if you're going to post (though you won't really post it), click the "Paste from Word" icon, paste, click Insert, then click the HTML icon in the forum post editor, copy the code from there, and paste into WordPress. This method produces pretty clean HTML.

Why not use a HTML editor in the first place?

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/232437#Comment_232437

Why not use a HTML editor in the first place?

If you're copying/pasting from Logos you'd have to manually add in all the formatting tags. If it's a short bit of text not a big deal, but a whole excerpt with complex formatting could be time consuming.

Tobias Lampert

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/232438#Comment_232438

Now I've got it - didn't think about the formatting tags.

Bob Schaefer

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/232434#Comment_232434

Hi, Rosie... thanks for responding!

I notice that the Logos forum uses the TinyMCE panel to provide editing features. I've got this installed in WordPress, as well, so I didn't need to use the Logos forum as an intermediary - I just used the "Paste from Word" icon already in my WordPress "edit post" page. It looked pretty good in the editor, except for not having the colored icons:

But notice that there are inexplicable line breaks in the content that need to be cleaned up. When I previewed the post, another formatting problem presented itself - everything was centered:

The icon problem is just a matter of the image links being local, rather than pointing to graphics on my server. If Logos were to implement an "HTML Snippet" export option, it would make sense to display these icons as the "checkbox" character with both the text and the background color for the text set to the same color, like this: ☐ ☐ ☐ ☐

Alternately, the bullet character could be colored appropriately: • • • •

There may be more elegant ways of doing it - I'm just illustrating that the effect could be generated without using any graphic at all.

Part of the formatting trouble seems to come with the table structure that Logos notes use. When I attempted to post a Clippings file to WordPress, it worked pretty well using Word as an intermediary:

Could use some prettying up, but there really aren't any functional problems with it.

Mark Barnes

I use Wordpress exclusively for all my websites, but I'm afraid there's no easy answer to this.

The coloured boxes in notes are images, and you can't copy/paste images into a Wordpress post.
Every Wordpress website has a different theme, and that theme will add its own formatting to your post.

The best 'solution' that I have found is to export from Logos in the HTML format, then open that file in Microsoft Word, then copy and paste it into Wordpress. That gives you really clean code and is the closest to your HTML snippet idea. The reason you have to go through Word is because Logos adds the styling as SPANs, which Wordpress seems not to like when you paste. Word converts them into other tags.

(I'm using Word 2010, but I would think this would work in 2007 as well. It probably won't work properly in 2003.)

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/232438#Comment_232438

but a whole excerpt with complex formatting could be time consuming.

Logos supports complex formatting!? Think of all the problems I thought I had with notes which have now evaporated![;)]

Actually, I tend to either use a screen print OR copy to a text editor to strip all formatting. Word Press has its own quirks of "invisible" HTML. Therefore, I either use <pre></pre> tags or provide the HTML manually within WordPress.

Bob Schaefer

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/232500#Comment_232500

The best 'solution' that I have found is to export from Logos in the HTML format, then open that file in Microsoft Word, then copy and paste it into Wordpress. That gives you really clean code and is the closest to your HTML snippet idea.

Mark,

You're right - that does give just about the cleanest results I've seen, while still preserving the links and formatting. The icons aren't there, but since Logos doesn't code them as text during the export to HTML, that's to be expected. (I still think that would be a good approach, rather than generating and linking to images, even if you want the full-fledged HTML export, and not just a snippet.)

Something about the exported HTML still causes my post to be centered, though. I'm not sure what the explanation is, except to say that the exported Clippings file worked just right. There's some unholy interaction going on between the code I'm getting from Logos/Word and the stylesheet defining my site's theme. [^o)]

I wish that the HTML export wouldn't resort to using hidden tables for layout. I think notes could be presented in an attractive and readable format without the tables. It wouldn't be quite as close a replica of the original note file's appearance, but the gain in simplicity would be worth the tradeoff.

Is this:

	John 3:1
	Nicodemus: Nicodemus also appears in Jn 7:50-52, 19:39-40.

really that much better than this?

☐ John 3:1 | Nicodemus: Nicodemus also appears in Jn 7:50-52, 19:39-40.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/232503#Comment_232503

but a whole excerpt with complex formatting could be time consuming.

Logos supports complex formatting!? Think of all the problems I thought I had with notes which have now evaporated!

I
wasn't talking about complex as in tables and such. I just meant if
there happened to be a paragraph with several different discontiguous
bits of bold or italic text in it, that would be a bunch of manual
inserting of HTML tags if you wanted to preserve the formatting but had
stripped it all out by pasting into an HTML editor as Theolobias had suggested.