NowComment can handle most HTML and Word files people try to upload, but occasionally there is some fundamental problem with the document encoding that NowComment can't work around.

Less severe but more common: files that have a carriage return at the end of every physical line can be problematic for copy-and-paste. Simple files may process OK, but your results will be much better if you first remove extraneous carriage returns (using search and replace with a word processor or text editor) and then upload the edited file.

Here are some hints for particular applications:

Adobe PDF (Acrobat) Copy-and-paste

PDF files whose text you can select/highlight can be used, but they must first be converted to Microsoft Word text format and then uploaded as a Word file. You have several reasonable options:

• desktop applications like Acrobat Professional or Acrobat Standard (but not Acrobat Reader), Nuance PDF Converter, Nitro PDF Professional, or BCL easyConverter Desktop.
• a free online converter such as PDF To Word Online can handle relatively short documents.

Note 1: Most other PDF converters we’ve seen will turn your PDF into an image file, and NowComment can’t process image files.

Note 2: You can try copy-and-pasting the text of a PDF into NowComment, but you’ll get decent results only if the PDF file is very very simple (e.g. no pictures, no page footers or other page formatting, almost all the text is in a single font and color) and if you edit the text in our data entry box to fix obvious problems (e.g. font and text color, carriage returns at the end of each physical line of text) before you start your upload.

HTML Copy and Paste Upload

• Don’t use Firefox (one of our favorite browsers!) to upload documents; rich text formatting (bold, italics, superscripts, color, etc.) will be lost. This isn’t a NowComment limitation; see Google’s suggestions and this MozillaZine article.
• Copy only the text you want to discuss (not advertisements, site navigation links, links to unrelated documents, etc.)
• as above, files that have a carriage return at the end of every physical line won’t be formatted well.

File Uploads – Microsoft Word (only)

• As above, files that have a carriage return at the end of every physical line won’t be formatted well.
• Pictures and images may not display if they are within paragraphs with text wrapped around them; better to have them standing on their own (separated from text by carriage returns).