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Copy formatted HTML to clipboard?

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Ryon Day

22 Apr, 2013 04:40 PM

I use MMDC for almost all of my writing now. It saves me at least an hour or two a week, and that's a conservative estimate.

Right now I use Outlook Web Access for e-mail. Formatting an OWA document is odious at best (no keyboard shortcuts; buttons only). I found that I can copy HTML off of a web page and paste it in to OWA and it preserves formatting!

However, I haven't been able to copy directly from MMDC into the OWA window. I can copy the rich text output from the preview window, but it doesn't preserve much formatting (different headers appear simply as bold text). I tried "Copy Document as HTML" but it just puts the raw HTML source into the clipboard, which appears as the raw HTML source in the OWA window.

Is there any way that MMDC can copy the formatted, interpreted HTML to the clipboard? Right now I've been exporting to HTML to a temp file, highlighting it in Chrome, and pasting it in OWA. As sad as it is that this is STILL faster than actually using OWA, the ability to do this with a single command would take me to editing nirvana.

Thanks!

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Fletcher on 22 Apr, 2013 05:10 PM

   

   Ryon,

   Thanks for purchasing Composer, and thanks for writing.

   You seem to be confusing a couple of concepts, so I'm not 100% sure what you're doing to lead to incorrect and correct results.

   There's no such thing as "formatted, interpreted HTML." HTML is the raw text (e.g. <h1>Heading</h1>). Your browser can convert this to rich text, or images, or something else on screen. But then it's no longer HTML.

   It sounds like what you're trying to do is paste Rich Text into OWA. So I would recommend trying the "Copy as Rich Text" command. ;)

   If that's not working, some mail programs allow you to edit the HTML source for a formatted message. You could probably paste the HTML source in there to get the proper result.

   If I have misunderstood you, please let me know.

   I hear you about the time-saving though --- I often miss Composer's features when I'm typing an email in Apple Mail (or any other app).

   Fletcher

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2. 2 Posted by Ryon Day on 22 Apr, 2013 05:48 PM

   

   Yup, you're absolutely right and thanks for the quick response and after some investigation I find that this is absolutely not the purview of MMDC. You cal close this question, but read on if you are interested in my findings...

   The secret sauce here seems to be that Google Chrome is an odd browser. It will NOT take RTF as correct input when pasting (Safari however does) at least with Outlook Web Access (but I imagine this is a typical browser rich text field).

   I created a MMD document with several headers, bulleted lists, a table, and exported it to an HTML file. I then opened that HTML file with both browsers. and found the following interesting results:

   When copying the HTML document from Safari:
   * It shows as "Rich Text" in Finder->View clipboard * It will paste correctly into OWA in safari * It will NOT paste correctly into Chrome's OWA or GMail rich text fields; the formatting is wonky.

   When copying the HTML document from Chrome:
   * It shows as 'text' in Finder->View clipboard (!!) * It pastes correctly (!!!) in Safari

   This is not the first interoperation difficulty I've had with Chrome and my MacBook (you can't paste raw pictures into OWA on Chrome). It would appear that behind the scenes, Chrome is doing some cross-platformy stuff that makes it behave pathologically in the Mac ecosystem. I guess the only thing to do here is file a chromium bug, but I guess they'll get around to it when they release a 64-bit version for OSX (lol).

   Thanks for an amazing product again.

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3. 3 Posted by Ryon Day on 22 Apr, 2013 05:50 PM

   

   Oh as a note, the rich text preview window in MMDC pastes like a champ into Safari rich text input controls like OWA.

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4. Fletcher closed this discussion on 22 Apr, 2013 06:22 PM.