Importing documents into Knol

You can insert a Document if that is what you mean. Click on 'Edit this Knol' and then 'Insert' gives you a lot of options, choose document and insert it either from your docs or any place in the web by providing a web URL.

Yes, I found that, but I figured giving the URL to a Google Doc would get around the formatting weirdness you always get when importing from Word. If it was composed as a Google Doc originally, it seems kinda silly to save as Word, download, then re-upload and re-convert, especially given all the HTML cleanup you have to do going that route.

There is a difference between importing a document and embedding a document. Importing a document creates a new knol based on that document. What you probably want is to embed the presentation in your existing knol. This help knol may help you:
http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/embedding-objects-in-your-knol/si57lahl1w25/86

Thanks for the reply and the help knol. This is the way I tried before

I actually meant as insert my presentation. Did not think about import knol feature.

When I tried with insert presentation in Knol it says the URL http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=d3k897d_8ft2fjdd3 you entered is not supported

Thanks again,
Jag

I see what you mean now. It works for the other types (spreadsheets, docs) but not for presentations. Thanks for the feedback. As a work around for now, if your google account owns the presentation it will show up in the list and you can select from that.

Knol Help - I have had the same problem with loading Google Docs Presentations into Knol.
I select "Insert" "Presentation" - The list appears from my Google Docs - I select the "Presentation" I want inserted - and an error message appears - the message says "The URL you selected is not supported". The URL is identified as "http://knol.google.com/".

There was an issue to insert a presentation into a knol. The issue should have been fixed now. Thank for the feedback.

Thanks. I will pass it on.

Hi Chad,
Thank you for the feedback. I have passed your suggestion on to the team for consideration.

Thank you.

Hello Olivier,

We currently support just 8 different kinds of embedded documents, as described on this page:
http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/embedding-objects-in-your-knol/si57lahl1w25/86#
Unsupported document embedding types will be stripped out.

We do support embedding of slideshows created in Google Docs.

We may support additional forms of embedded continue in the future, but cannot at this time when or if we might support PDF.

Olivier,

Thank you for the suggestions. We will add them to our feature requests list.

Support for a blog API would allow integration with Google Docs.

Thank you for the feedback, Joe. LaTeX support is a frequently requested feature, and we are looking into whether we can add it. We generally cannot pre-announce when new features will be available.

Thank you for your response to my comment. I'd like to suggest that google consider using jsMath for implementing LaTeX on knol. It's open source, easy to use (embed latex inline in document html) and easy to implement (just include some javascript in the browser).

http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/welcome.html

There are other approaches out there too but many seem to produce poor looking math or are not supported by all browsers. Cheers. -Joe

Thanks, Joe. I've forwarded you suggestion to the team looking at LaTeX support.

Hello Howard,

Thank you for your interest in Knol. I can answer some of your questions.

Q: why not make it easier to migrate content?

We are interesting in creating, or enabling others to create, better tools for working with Knol content. Better import capabilities are definitely on our roadmap, but we cannot at present say when such new capabilities may be released.

You can get some sense of the pace and focus of our work by taking a look at our release notes. Historically we have had a few new features to announce roughly once a week:

http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/knol-announcements-and-release-notes/1ng4pryc7bgdb/11#

Q: why not give us a template in MS Word?

Two reasons. First, if we provided an MS Word template, reasonable persons might assume that they could add text and formatting atop that template using MS Word, then import the result into Knol. Now, while we can import text from MS Word, in general we do not import much of the styling present in external documents. So, unless our import facilities were considerably upgraded, providing an MS Word template would create misleading expectations.

Second, we don't have a predefined internal structure for knols. That is, at this time, something for users or communities to create on your own. If you, or other users, have ideas for what should be in a template, advocate them. Show off your sample templates. See if others adopt the idea.

Q: why can't I use MS Word tables? ...every attempt thuse far has resulted in varying loss of: fonts, alignment, paragraph spacing, borders, shading, ... and my sanity

You can use tables, alignment, and shading using Knol's built-in editor. We will work to improve that editor over time.

When documents are imported, we strip all but basic HTML formatting tags, and we drop CSS styling. Part of the reason to do this is to keep the document simple enough so that the editors built into browsers can handle it. Editors built in to contemporary, widely-used browers are really a zoo of mismatched and limited capabilities, and for the online editor to work across a range of such browsers we are restricted to a "least common denominator".

Also, it has been our desire that knols have a more-or-less similar look and style as a reader moves between different author's knols. We encourage authors to keep their document styles simple for that reason as well.

Q: would you please consider a tool that I can use offline? ...preferably, based upon the MS Word interface -- if you gotta go open source, consider OpenOffice -- so I can easily migrate content and not lose all those links, cross references and formatting I have so meticulously inserted

Thanks for the suggestion. Our current focus is on improving and growing the site itself, not on building tools external to it.

Q: when will there be a spellchecker? ...article editor ...comment editor

A spellchecker would be useful, and has been requested by others, but we have nothing to announce at this time.

article editor -- you can already edit articles online, and we are working steadily to improve it. What are the most important thing lacking(s)? (Other than import / migrate, obviously.) In particular, we've been collecting feature requests here: http://knol.google.com/k/julian/knol-feature-requests/3kmjoa0hcpphn/9#

comment editor -- you can edit your comments. Comments are plain, nonformatted text, so the editor is relatively trivial. We do not plan on making comments into rich text fields. (We should make some improvements to the comment editor -- on some browsers it does not correctly handle whitespace when going into edit mode.)

Q: is there a focus group in New York CIty for KNOL authors, so we can sit around the same table, trade tips and write up notes for distribution to other groups of authors?

I am not aware of such a focus group, at present.

We have been pointing English language users to this Google Group to discuss the product: http://groups.google.com/group/knol-users/topics?pli=1

Q: is there a specialist at NYC offices of Google willing to host such a SIG?

I will pass that suggestion on, and do let us know if you have hooked up with sufficient people to form a SIG.

For offline access, how about integration with Google Gears?

Well if it makes your lil heart happy, dude. Could care less about geek, techie things. Humanity and charity is what we need, man.
Peace
On WTF you're talking about!

Como puedo saber la cantidad de visitas a mi Knols?

Google docs can read ODF files, so they could adapt it easy to knol, since they already know how to parse this kind of documents. I also hope that the add support for this free/open format in Knol.