Open Live Writer

As I am away from home with limited internet access I am using Open Live Writer to prepare this post offline. Once I’m done I’ll log on to the internet and complete my post.

In 2016 when genimates like Shelley from Twigs of Yore said that they used Open Live Writer  I hopped on the bandwagon and, after using it for a few posts, went back to drafting my posts using Blogger online.

I have mentioned Open Live Writer as a good free tool in my Managing Frugally presentation that I have prepared for #Congress_2018 and I wanted to brush up on my knowledge before I take to the stage at the conference.



It appears as though I have a very narrow space in which to enter my text I was able to change the font and font size in my post. I have managed to prepare a draft post and look at its preview, I’ve inserted some hyperlinks and some images – one from my computer and one from my smartphone that is attached to computer via USB. I used the text highlighter to add emphasis to some words in my text – that was nifty.

The spellcheck facility that is on the toolbar found a couple of errors for me ((I can spell) but my typing is punk.



I like the subscript and superscript buttons on the toolbar and the wordcount tool will come in handy too.

When I look at the preview of this post the text looks awfully large although I selected font size of 10 when the default was 4. I presumed this measure was in pt (point size) but maybe it is an em measurement. I guess that I’ll find out when I upload my post to Blogger.

I’ve prattled on for long enough so I’ll turn on my hotspot and upload a draft of this to GeniAus (I’m not game to post it directly from here as it may look like a dog’s breakfast.

And what did I find? The post content transferred well but there was no break between my paragraphs. This was easy to fix - I just added some html code (break) to create space between the paragraphs. There were also issues with the font - it was tiny. I was unable to fix this via the Blogger menu so it was back to the code. I'm not too good with html code but as I read through it I found lots of instances of xx-small and x-small font. I gambled and changed these to small and my post became readable. 

Once I learn where I have gone wrong I may go back to using Open Live Writer especially when I need to preserve my data.

I Learn by Doing

Several weeks ago my genimate Shelley (or was it Carmel?) suggested using Open Live Writer to draft posts for our blogs.
Because I learn by trial and error and resort to instructions or manuals on an ás needs’ basis I decided to try out this tool.
As I had a trip to Rootstech on the radar and I knew I was getting a new laptop I put off my experiment until I got back home and became familiar with my new toy.
So today is the day. I have successfully installed the software and linked it to this blog. Now I’m writing the post.
The interface has familiar icons plus a few that are missing from Blogger. There appear to be more options on the Toolbar, I particularly the ‘Insert’ options. As a fan of tables it appears to be easy to insert tables into a post.  Let’s see if I can do it right now

First Name	Last Name	DoB
Matthew	Page	12/09/2012
Jane	Fowles	02/09/1876
Peter	Royds	26/07/1994

I can even insert Emoticons and Bing Maps (but I prefer Google Maps).   
I think the categories bar is the same as tags in Blogger but will have to confirm when I post.
What has got me flummoxed is that the default font for paragraphs is set a 4 points and that even when I change it to 10 I can barely read what I have typed. I think this may be a Wndows 10 issue as it is happening with some other apps.
This is what my input window looks like.


All in all it's looking promising but I would love some assistance to get an input display I can read.