Preparing content offline

Before posting directly to a site, you may want to start in a word processing program. Potential advantages include:

• Saving time online. This is a particular consideration if you're on dial-up.
• Access to spell-check and other editing features.

Depending on how much formatting you wish to do, you could also consider using an HTML editor. These include, for instance, the "composer" that comes with Mozilla and Netscape. Here are the steps involved:

• Type or copy and paste your text into the HTML editor.
• Apply formatting as desired (e.g., bold, italics).
• Bring up the HTML (encoded) view of the text.

This HTML is what you'll copy and paste into Drupal's input form, to have formatted copy.