[Dixonary] Embellishing Text from Excel

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... (AT) acm (DOT) 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


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