Pure Text
Posted on July 9, 2006
3 Comments
One of the big challenges folks often run into WordPress is the odd things that happen when they compose a post in something like Word but then copy/paste it to the WP WYSIWYG post editor. Well, when you do that, you get the underlying formatting as part of the paste. Embedded as html code. So, if in the Word document the author did some font face or style changes, they come along as part of the paste -- nicely overriding the CSS associated with the blog theme. And let's not forget html layout. What happens if the entire document isn't part of the copy? Mismatched tags. Broken theme. Support forum posts.
Why would someone draft a blog post in MS Word (oh, and OpenOffice Write causes similar issues, just not as extreme)? How about spelling and grammar checking? Those aren't native to WordPress yet without plugins. Or heck, to some people, Word is the only tool they really know. Regardless, a lot of folks seem to use it.
So, for instance, I wrote this in MS Word:
Now is the time for all good sleeping foxes to jump over their country.
In Spain.
The actual pasted code looked like:
Eeks.
Perhaps now, however, there's some hope. I stumbled over this nifty little utility last night and immediately thought of the issue above. The application is a free utility called PureText from SteveMiller.net. From the product page:
Have you ever copied some text from a web page, a word document, help, etc., and wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple. Just copy/cut whatever you want to the clipboard, click on the PureText tray icon, and then paste to any application. Better yet, you can configure a Hot-Key to convert and paste the text for you. The pasted text will be pure and free from all formatting.
Very simple to use and does exactly what it says. I think I'll start suggesting it when people report related issues at the forums.
Tags: blog, PureText, WordPress
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3 Responses to “Pure Text”
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The trouble with PureText, is it loses *all* of the formatting, even if some was desired formatting. Another option, which is admitedly hard to use, is filter.exe which is an optional install along with Microsoft Office and can clean up Word’s awful HTML, including removing CSS style information (all the class=”msoNormal” crap) but keeping structural information like H1 etc.
The other option is to use an editor that supports importing from Word and filtering the content natively. I believe some of the free/opensource editors are starting to do a decent job of this and there are plugins for WordPress that let you use them as the WYSIWYG editor. The commercial WYSIWYG HTML editors generally have excellent support for importing from word.
Disclaimer: I earn my living by developing Ephox EditLive! for Java, one such commercial editor. That’s how I know about this stuff.