About editing and navigating in Substack

20220614 The mechanics of Substack –

This is a post of my own notes on how Substack works. I will link to it in reminding you readers – and myself – how to use it. I will amend it from time to time with my own discoveries and those that other people kindly add as comments.

1) Hyperlinks are underscored. Unlike other platforms, they are not highlighted with blue or anything. Whenever you see an underscore in my writing, it is a hyperlink. The Substack editor does not support underlines for emphasis.

2) If you want to provide a link to one of my columns you see in an email, don't link to the email but rather click on the title within the email so the article comes up in Substack. You can then copy the URL that begins with https://grahamseibert.substack.com

3) If you want to unsubscribe, do it from the email itself before navigating to Substack. This is what it looks like at the bottom of a mailing.

4) For authors. Substack has weak features for handling tables, fonts and the like. Format your material in another package such as Word or Excel, take a screenshot, crop the screenshot and embed it as a graphic. Microsoft’s free photo editor, available for download from their store, should do the trick.

This is to document a step in perfecting my technique. To produce this post, I did the following:

1.     Had my browser print the article as a PDF.

2.     Used the Kofax Power PDF program (about $100) to convert it to Microsoft Word.

3.     Saved a copy without the graphics

4.     Converted it to a two column table. In this case there is one table line for each line in the original text. Depending on how it's recognized, it may go by paragraphs.

5.     Added my own comments in the column on the right.

6.     Copied and pasted the graphics into the left-hand column, the original.

7.     Set the margins to 0.1 top, bottom, left and right.

8.     Had Microsoft Word print to Power PDF

9.     Opened the resulting PDF in Kofax OmniPage Pro

10. Exported as jpg, resulting in one jpg image per page of text.

11. Created a new Substack post and entered a handful of blank lines

12. Went to the middle of the blank lines and copied in the jpgs into Substack. It works best if you do it in reverse order.

5) Substack will accept embedded videos. When I copy and paste it as text with a link to the video, that’s what I get.

Marianna and Bunny

When I paste just the URL, without text, I get the video. However, this worked for YouTube but did not work for Rumble. I’ll keep trying other alternative platforms and see which, if any, work with Substack.

6) If you want to include excerpts from other people's material set off by orange bars on the left, simply indent it in your word processor. It will pick up the orange line as you paste it into Substack.

7) If despite all   Then create your Lastly, create a 
you do want to   post in a word      poetry block in  
do some              processor using   your post        
primitive tables Courier New or   telling Substack 
in Substack,       some other font   not to           
navigate to         that is not             repaginate and   
settings, fonts,   proportionally     paste the        
& choose mono  spaced.                 tabular material 
This will apply                                 in it.           
to all of your                    
posts.  When you                   
change it back
they will be messed up.                   

8) Line spacing is 1 1/2 for paragraphs, 1 for a line break. If you want to tighten it up, go to the start of the second line, press backspace to get rid of the paragraph mark, then press control enter to get a line break.