the curious incident of the copying conundrum

October 6, 2005 7:29 AM

is there a reason why effing windows copies text formatting when i simply Ctrl+C?

I'm trying to do some web design on somebody else's computer (on microsoft script editor), and when i copy something from firefox to paste in ms7, it adds tag information. when i copy from word, it adds a whole shitload of information like font formatting, etc; i just want to copy the text -- is that too much to ask?

posted by yonation to computers & internet (20 comments total)

Just use notepad.

Windows stores multiple copies of the data on the clipboard in difrent formats, and programs can specify what data they want to recive. So if a program asks for text, it gets text. If it says it can handle HTML, it gets HTML.

if you use notepad, you'll get only the text. Open up a copy of notepad (Start | Run... | type 'notepad' | hit OK), or go to (Start | Programs | Accessories | Notepad ).

Copy from the web page, paste into Notepad, and then copy the text back out of notepad and into script editor, or just write your web pages in notepad.
posted by delmoi at 7:34 AM on October 6, 2005

this is my build-and-fix approach; is there a way to stop this middle step? it's really, really annoying.
posted by yonation at 7:36 AM on October 6, 2005

Technically, it's a shorcoming of the receiving app. When you copy text to the clipboard, it makes it available in a number of formats - plain text, rich text, HTML, whatever the source app wants.

If you go to 'Paste Special' in Word, you'll see a bunch of different formats. Technically, the target app coul duse any of them, but I guess in this case it uses the fany format instead of a simpler one.

I don't know what 'ms7' is, but if you want to drop all the fancy formatted formats on the clipboard, paste it into notepad and then copy it out.

I agree it is a pain at times.
posted by GuyZero at 7:38 AM on October 6, 2005

An option if you can install programs.
posted by Nothing at 7:38 AM on October 6, 2005

Damn! Note to self: use preview.
posted by GuyZero at 7:38 AM on October 6, 2005

If anyone can find a real fix to this, I'd love to hear it, as one of our huge applications at work requires cutting and pasting marketing material from Word files into a web interface and the interns/newbies are always jacking things up by forgetting the intermediate Notepad step.
posted by spicynuts at 7:39 AM on October 6, 2005

Actually, I think this one might be better.
posted by Nothing at 7:41 AM on October 6, 2005

You can repaste the text into Word by using the "Paste Special" command in the Edit menu and then clicking "Unformatted Text." That should strip all formatting tags from the copy, meaning you can recopy and paste it to another program with (theoretically) no problem.
posted by Sully6 at 7:41 AM on October 6, 2005

As GuyZero said, paste special is your friend. You can also reach it by keyboard shortcut, so the whole action goes something like: Ctrl+C, Alt, E[dit], S[pecial], [select format preferred, also by letter], enter. Once the keystrokes are down it's no slower than Ctrl+V.
posted by whatzit at 7:42 AM on October 6, 2005

Thanks for the responses so far, mefis, but the problem is that I can't install apps, otherwise i would have put something with real power on. As it is, i use microsoft script editor, which comes with office, and has some minimal text editing capabilities (proper html tag coloring, etc). I'm not looking for dreamweaver or any of that stuff, but i'm desperate to cut out this middle, time consuming step.
posted by yonation at 7:42 AM on October 6, 2005

Well, the second program I linked doesn't need to be installed, if that makes a difference. It's just a single EXE that will strip formatting information from the clipboard.
posted by Nothing at 7:48 AM on October 6, 2005

yonation: I'm not familiar with microsoft script editor, and while i have office 2003, I don't see it on this computer...

Why not do the whole web page in notepad?
posted by delmoi at 8:01 AM on October 6, 2005

If anyone can find a real fix to this, I'd love to hear it, as one of our huge applications at work requires cutting and pasting marketing material from Word files into a web interface and the interns/newbies are always jacking things up by forgetting the intermediate Notepad step.

Well, you could have someone write an app that, when running, monitors changes to the clipboard and transmogrifies them into plain text*. As others mentioned, the source app has the responsibility to implement Copy and how it does it is up to it. Similarly the destintion app decides how and if to implement paste.

As far as not being able to install apps I suspect this is something that could be done entirely within the standard java security constraints so you could put it on a web page to run. I'm not a proper Java guy, however, so someone else will have to weigh in here.

*to the extent that's possible - obviously a copied picture isn't going to have a text translation
posted by phearlez at 8:08 AM on October 6, 2005

You could try stopping this from within Firefox. There's an extension available called "copy plain text" that will tell Firefox to drop formatting when copying to the clipboard. You can get it here.

I don't know if this counts as "installing software or not", as it's just a module for the browser.
posted by ducksauce at 8:23 AM on October 6, 2005

I don't know if this would work in Script Editor, but in Word on the computers I use I created a simple macro for "Paste Unformatted" and mapped it to Alt-V. (You could map it to Ctrl-V as well; I use both frequently so I didn't want to change the default of Ctrl-V as standard Paste.)
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 8:32 AM on October 6, 2005

Copy Plain Text. It's just an extension, it'll do what you need, you can uninstall it from Firefox when you're done.
posted by schroedinger at 8:48 AM on October 6, 2005

I mapped paste special in Word to Control-F (normally find which I never use) to combat word inserting a mini spreadsheet when pasting from Excel.
posted by Mitheral at 11:20 AM on October 6, 2005

copy the text, then alt e (edit) s (paste special) into word. How I do it, but some other options here look easier.
posted by lorrer at 12:28 PM on October 6, 2005

I just wanted to add a vote for Copy Plain Text. Note that you can set its options to override the normal Control+C so that anything you copy from Firefox will be plain text. I can't tell you how much time that extension has saved me!
posted by gemmy at 2:56 PM on October 6, 2005

There's also this from Microsoft.
posted by WCityMike at 3:51 PM on October 9, 2005