is there a way to fix formatting of stories from other websites?

[Blackmasha]

I wanted to pick up a story from Nifty and rebuild it (the author it seems quit a long time ago) but the wording of the story is only half page. an example below

as you can see the above is filling the entire page
from left to right, however what I'm writing right
now is only using half the page, I was wondering
if I could use word or another program to fix this
on the Choya website.

 

[insertnamehere]

This formatting implies that the author manually hit enter instead of relying on the website's automatic text wrap, which is bizzare. Perhaps you could use a text editor like Word to find+replace all newlines with spaces. Not sure how that would work out.

On another note, it is somewhat concerning that you are literally copying another person's work without their premission. You can take all the ideas you please, but the writing must be significantly different. You cannot leave anything the same, so you should never need to copy and paste any portion of their work in the first place. As it stands, what you are doing is against site rules (and illegal, incidentally).

Easiest way to avoid both issues, by far, is to just start from scratch.

 

[Blackmasha]

This formatting implies that the author manually hit enter instead of relying on the website's automatic text wrap, which is bizzare. Perhaps you could use a text editor like Word to find+replace all newlines with spaces. Not sure how that would work out.

On another note, it is somewhat concerning that you are literally copying another person's work without their premission. You can take all the ideas you please, but the writing must be significantly different. You cannot leave anything the same, so you should never need to copy and paste any portion of their work in the first place. As it stands, what you are doing is against site rules (and illegal, incidentally).

Easiest way to avoid both issues, by far, is to just start from scratch.

I clearly used the phrase "rebuild it", meaning the stories are going to be very different. I can't just copy word for word otherwise there's no point in me publishing those stories in the first place.

so other than fixing it manually you have no idea what program can I use?

 

[dingsdongs]

If you google "remove all line breaks", you can find all sorts of instructions on how to use editors or tools to remove line breaks.

I don't know how much text you want to edit, but if its more than just a few sentences, I doubt that there is any quick solution that will not require you to manually edit the text later. For example, if you were to automatically / programmatically remove all line breaks from the text, you would be left with only a single paragraph / wall of text. Or there might be spaces missing between the punctuation marks and the next sentence.

 

[gene.sis]

There are probably ways to fix this with programs but given the purpose, I don't see why it would be necessary at all.

If the story is going to be very different, you don't need the original material in a formatted form as you can't use it.

 

[Blackmasha]

There are probably ways to fix this with programs but given the purpose, I don't see why it would be necessary at all.

If the story is going to be very different, you don't need the original material in a formatted form as you can't use it.

I understand where you're going with this and you are correct, by the end either I get the author permission or I change enough of the story so no one can actually say it was stolen. I simply want to copy paste the entire story into word let's say, and then start working on it without line breaks as dingsdongs pointed out, then I can put a page I've worked on directly to Choya and save it in the already correct format.

right now it looks weird to me, ofc I can always keep it as it is, but I'm sure others won't like this formatting as well.

 

[insertnamehere]

I can't just copy word for word otherwise there's no point in me publishing those stories in the first place.

Yes, exactly. So you don't need to copy anything. At all. Ever. You're either plagiarising, or you're changing it to the degree that you never need to copy and paste. I'm not assuming your intention; I'm merely letting you know that this is the case.

so other than fixing it manually you have no idea what program can I use?

I'm not sure what you mean. In what way is using find+replace in Word manual? That's about as automatic as you can get. I just checked, and it works perfectly fine. The plaintext symbol for line break is ^l and the one for paragraph break is ^p.