How to contribute articles to Legaltree.ca

Even if you submit your own document, the basic formatting should comply with that set out for option #1 above.

 

Perhaps surprisingly, transforming content from Microsoft Word into html format (the computer language that determines how content is displayed on the internet) is quite challenging. This is because content in Word has lots of hidden formatting associated with it, which causes problems when copying and pasting into html editors. Therefore, depending on your browser and version of Word, sometimes the text editor described in Step 4 below can behave unpredictably.

 

The text editor works best with Internet Explorer as a browser. If you are having trouble with formatting, email your article to us and we will happily post it for you.

 

Only registered users can create pages, and they must log on to do so. Once logged on, the user will see a menu with their user name as its title on the right hand side. One of the menu items will be “create content”. Click “create content”, and then click “page”. You are now in the page input environment.

 

First, you must enter a Title for your page. This is the title that will appear at the top of you page. Put careful thought into the page title to ensure it reflects the content of your page. This title should not be more than about 10 words.

 

It is very important to place your page in a logical location, or else Legaltree users will not be able to navigate to your page.

 

If you are contributing an article, click the “Articles” drop down menu and select the category best suited to your article. If there is no suitable category, add your article under miscellaneous and the Legaltree administrators will create a suitable category and move your article to it.

The body of your page must be entered in the input window titled “Body”. Although you will find that it is possible to type content directly into the input window, it is absolutely essential that you cut and paste into the input window from a Word document for the following reasons:

o       You are contractually required to keep your own backups of the documents you publish. While we make every effort to maintain the site and protect the content on it, it is possible that the server will crash and all content on the website will be lost forever. To protect against loss of your work, you should keep your own copy of all published material. In fact, you should not consider the website version to be your primary version. You should view your private copy as your primary version, and the material published on the website as a copy of your primary version.

o       Word is a more user friendly editing environment.

o       Once you have submitted text via the input window, that content is published on the internet for all to see. Therefore, it is not appropriate to post text unless you have finished working on it. Therefore, you should edit your document in Word until you are satisfied that it is ready for publication.

 

Paste your content into the body input window. If you are copying and pasting from Word a window will popup asking if you want to “clean” your content before pasting it. You should do this by clicking “OK” i.e. content copied and pasted from Word has hidden formatting information attached to it which should be removed.

 

To save being prompted and having to click OK, you can paste by clicking the “Paste from Word” icon which has the Word graphic on it i.e. click the icon at the top of the editor that is a picture of a clipboard with the Word emblem on it.

 

See the Troubleshooting section at the bottom of this page if you are having trouble with the text editor.

 

After entering the body of the page, the user has the option of entering a log message. This is mostly just for if you want to make notes to yourself i.e. you will be able to come back and edit your pages, and if you leave a note in the log section, it will be there for you if you return to edit the page. Generally, users need not bother with log messages.

 

You are ready to submit your page, click “Submit”.

 

Sometimes the text editor described in Step 4 below can behave unpredictably. This is caused by hidden computer code attached to the content that you cut and paste from Microsoft Word. Word is notorious for causing such problems, and that is why rich text editors are used. Unfortunately, depending on your browser and the version of word, the rich text editor may not work as it should.

 

There are some tricks one can do to fix these bugs, such as editing the html code directly. If you are familiar with editing HTML, click the “Source” icon on the top left of the editor menu to see the source code.

 

If you are unable to get the output to look the way you want, email your article to us and we will post it for you. Alternatively, the following tips may help you fix the formatting problems:

 

If you find that strange extra lines have been inserted that you cannot seem to get rid of; after pasting from word into the “paste from word dialogue box”, click OK and then, in the rich text editing window, select all the text and then click the “format” drop down list and then select “Normal (DIV)” to set it all to single spaced text.

 

If you find that the editor is not inserting an empty line where there should be one, in the rich text editing window, enter a few spaces on the line you want to be empty.

 

As a general rule, you should have no editing problems with the following format features:

o       Bold

o       Italic

o       Underline

o       Indented text

 

The following format features may or may not cause problems:

o       Numbered lists

o       Bulleted lists (solid bullets are safer than hollow bullets, or other bullet styles)

o       Coloured font

o       Tables

 

The following formatting features often cause problems

o       Footnotes

o       Tables of contents