The Service ‘Scrivener: Make New Clipping’ on a selection from a Web page in Firefox will lose all formatting. Essentially it gives the same as ‘Scrivener: Make New Clipping (Unformatted)’, except that the font is different. A Copy and Paste from the same selection will keep all formatting, however. So apparently the service is not equivalent to a New document, followed by Copy/Paste, which it should be.
Is this a known bug?
I noticed that the same service from Skim or Preview keeps the formatting. Also from Safari the formatting is retained.
This kind of oddity is not uncommon with software that has been ported to the Mac. I remember back when I used the Opera browser, no formatted text would even copy and paste out of it, it just didn’t even support the concept.
I tested Firefox with a number of rich text based Services, including Apple’s “Display Font Information” which will load Font Book and show the currently used font, sending the text to Mail and Nisus Writer Pro and in all cases I just got plain-old raw text. My guess is that its just an incompatibility between Firefox and the Mac subsystem.
I think I have some more info on this. I noticed that the service “Add to Evernote” when called from Firefox does keep the formatting.
I now think the problem is that Firefox does offer its formatted text as HTML, but not as RTF. I have seen that in the clipboard info, and from Firefox bug reports I understand that services in Firefox do the same as the Copy command.
Apparently Evernote does accept HTML for its service, and Scrivener does not. So if Scrivener would accept both RTF and HTML as input for the services, the problem probably would be solved. It shouldn’t be too hard to accept this, as the Copy/Paste also accepts it. You can see that because Copy/Paste from Firefox does keep the formatting. Also you can import HTML in Scrivener.