Learning the World » WYSIWYG http://knewquist.edublogs.org An education tech blog by Ken Newquist Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:12:54 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Mac Firefox 3 won’t copy/paste formatted text http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/05/mac-firefox-3-wont-copypaste-formatted-text/ http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/05/mac-firefox-3-wont-copypaste-formatted-text/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:01:12 +0000 Kenneth Newquist http://knewquist.edublogs.org/?p=145 As I alluded to yesterday, Firefox 3 on the Mac won’t accepted formatted text from other applications (most notably word). While this does mean that users don’t have to deal with the Word<->Firefox 3  extraneous code problem, also means that every document that gets cut and pasted into Firefox 3 is going to come in without any sort of formatting. This is a pain for folks who were used to this functionality in Firefox 2, and I expect that we’ll see more and more complaints about this as Firefox 3 achieves deeper penetration on campus.

There’s a report on this bug in Bugzilla; please vote for it. 

There’s also a good conversation about the issue, including possible workarounds, at MacRumors.com:

Note that Safari on the Mac does not have this problem, but I’ve found Safari support in TinyMCE and CKEditor flaky at best (e.g. when cutting and pasting from Word into Safari using TinyMCE 2.x in Drupal, the resulting text will have random spaces removed from between words).

Update 11/7/2008

The patch that fixes this problem has been committed, so hopefully we’ll see this in production soon!

]]> http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/05/mac-firefox-3-wont-copypaste-formatted-text/feed/ 0 Problems with copy/paste between Firefox 3 and Word http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/04/problems-with-copypaste-between-firefox-3-and-word/ http://knewquist.edublogs.org/2008/11/04/problems-with-copypaste-between-firefox-3-and-word/#comments Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:22:03 +0000 Kenneth Newquist http://knewquist.edublogs.org/?p=143 Firefox 3 for Windows has changed the way it handles copy and pasting text from other applications, such as Word, which in turn is causing extra code to show up in posts to a variety of web apps, including Moodle, Drupal, and WordPress. Firefox 3 for Mac has its own issues (namely it won’t copy/paste rich text from Word at all).

This Moodle Tracker report offers one scenario where the problem pops up. I encountered it earlier in the semester as well, and unfortunately the best workaround I had at the time was to tell folks to use IE to do cutting and pasting if they wanted to preserve their formatting (or copy/pasting into Notepad before pasting into Firefox 3 if they didn’t.

The extra code is style data that Firefox 2 omitted, but Firefox 3 includes:

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New
Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} span.EmailStyle15
{mso-style-type:personal; mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial;
mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; color:windowtext;} @page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> 

Digging around on the web, I found a post (”Pasting from Word in Firefox 3 Doesn’t Remove Meta/Style Tags”) that explains the problem:

The problem is due to that Firefox 3.0 is presenting itself to MS Word as a XML client and the content pasted in the editor has new format different to this one pasted in Firefox 2.0. That is why the regular expressions used by the editor’s Paste From Word filters are not stripping the new MS Word XML formatting. 

I can’t find anything in Bugzilla that speaks to this (my guess is that it would be viewed as a feature rather than a bug).  

My understanding is that there’s always extraneous code coming over from Word, but that the various WYSIWYG editors (TinyMCE, CKEditor) endeavor to strip out said code. The problem, aside from the fact that Firefox 3 has changed the way it does copy and paste, is that the editors haven’t caught up with the changes. I found posts for both editors discussing how to deal with this.

On the CKEditor site, there’s a tracker report about improving the editor itself:

I couldn’t find any official tracker posts for TinyMCE, but there were two forum posts relating to it with proposed workarounds:
So ultimately, this isn’t a Moodle problem. Or a Drupal problem. Or a WordPress problem; it’s a WYSIWYG editor problem, and needs to be addressed at that level.
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