Forums → Support Forum → How to Preview a Post in Armor Games (Post Preview Tutorial)

This tutorial will explain how to preview a post on the Armor Games (Version 2) forum. The tutorial should also make it easier to organise, compose, and correct longer posts, posts with images, posts with links, and original posts that are the start of new topics. (This tutorial will probably be pointless once Armor Games Version 3 comes out and is not very useful for short posts without images or short posts without links, but it might help a few people).

This tutorial is geared to users on PCs (not MACs).
Here are some useful shortcuts (for PCs) that may make this tutorial easier:
Select all: ctrl + a
Copy: ctrl + c
Paste: ctrl + v

_______________________________________________________________________

The Tutorial

Step 1: Create a new rich text document or word document.

(Any text editor that allows the user to change the font, font style, font size, and paragraph indents will work as well.)

Step 2: Set up the document to these specifications and then save it:

Font Type - Arial
Font Size - 10 or 11
Line Spacing - Single
No spacing added between paragraphs
Right Indentation -0.19" (This can be done by sliding the right most arrow on the ruler one and a half marks past the default position)



Setting up the document like this will make it appear like a finished post in the forums, which will help you visualize how the
final post will look and organise it as well.

Step 3: Type out your post in the newly made text document (which is set to the specifications from Step 2).

You may wish to make the font bold or italic in the text document. Doing so will help you get a visual preview of the final post. Just remember that you will still have to add the forum tags after copying and pasting your post back into the post reply box in order for that text to show up bold or in italics.



Step 4: Copy and paste what you have typed in Step 3 (the post you want to make) into the post reply box in the thread you want to reply to or in the thread you are going to start. Modify the text you want bold and or italic and add any quotes, images, or links by using the forum tags (Bold, Italic, Link, Image, Quote,).

(You may skip this step and add the forum tags in manually to the text document, if you know the forum tag codes. Although doing this may take more time.)



If you do not wish to make sure that your forum tags are working correctly or did not use forum tags you can simply submit your post at this point.

Step 5: After adding all the forum tags, copy and paste your post back into the text document you made in Step 2 and save it.



Step 6: Go to http://www.bbcode-to-html.com/ (or a similar site that has the same features) and copy and paste what you have just saved in in your text document from Step 5 into the conversion box on the site.



Step 7: Convert the text (essentially the forum tags) to html by clicking the "Convert BBCode to HTML" button on the site.

It should not matter what check boxes you have checked but, "close tags properly for XHTML" should probably be checked and "Ignore font type and size declarations" should probably be unchecked.

After converting the text the site should take you to a page with the converted text on it. The text should be converted now like in the image below.



Step 8: Copy and paste the converted (html) text (shown in the image in Step 7) into a new text document and save the document as an html file.

To save the document as an html file you can simple just change the file extension manually as shown in the picture below. (You may need to go to Computer > Tools > Folder Options > View(tab) and then uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types" in order to see the file extension and change it manually.)



(The "Save as type:" box will be overridden to the file extension you manually save the file as, so it does not matter what this box says as long as you manually change the file extension to .html the file will be save as an html file.)

Step 9: Open the html file you have just created in Step 8 and see if everything worked correctly.



This is especially helpful for checking links and images. (The below image demonstrates all the different forum tags doing there functions.)



Step 10: If everything worked correctly open the text document you created in Step 5 (this would be the file that has all the forum tag coding and not html coding) select everything and copy and paste it into the post reply box in the topic your are replying to or the topic you are starting and then hit submit.

If it did not work correctly, find out where the errors are and then correct them. You can do this by opening up the text document you created in Step 5 an either manually fixing the code or by repeating Step 4 through Step 10. Do Step 4 through Step 10 until you have everything correct and then submit your post.

______________________________________________________________________

Note 1: You cannot convert the forum tag code manually to html because you will not be checking for mistakes in the forum tag code and it would also take a long amount of time.

Note 2: Make sure that you do not post the html code back into the post reply box. It will not work. You must use the forum tag code.