Hi there, trying to paste into various other apps — including Chrome and Google Docs — and whenever I do all the formatting is getting stripped. Itals are the most probelmatic, but it’d be nice if everything came through.
Any suggestions? I’ve tried pasting with keyboard shortcuts as well as long-taps and on-screen displays.
I would test with something a little more traditional than a “web app” running in a browser. Pages, TextEdit, even Scrivener itself would serve as a better test for seeing if Scrivener is correctly copying formatted text and you Mac is in general capable of pasting it.
For something like a web page, it has to be specifically programmed to understand the type of clipboard you’re using, and as you can imagine, most developers only focus on supporting the 99%—which is usually Word. Scrivener uses a very standard clipboard type for the Mac, but that in the grand scheme of things is not very common from say Google’s perspective.
Google Docs is a native iPad app. I also tried Notes and a few other editors with no luck.
Sorry, I mistook your post for a macOS one, where Google Docs would only be used within a browser. Well, that aside, it’s probably not entirely native in the sense that Scrivener is. We use the iOS rich text editing environment, and I highly doubt Google threw away all of their Web code for the iOS version of Google Docs to adopt that. It’s probably just a thinly wrapped layer over the original site using Web Kit—but I’m just guessing.
Whatever the case, on iOS there is less to test with, and less interoperability between programs to my awareness (which isn’t too expert, to be perfectly clear, I don’t use rich text formatting myself). Since formatting didn’t exist for so many years, many companies (and sometimes even departments within companies, like Apple’s Notes, Mail and Pages all having different rich text editing features) made their own editors from scratch, and they are not always compatible when it comes to clipboard usage.
Is Google Docs capable of loading files? If so it might work better to compile from Scrivener, or “share” a section as a file and use the “Open with” feature.
Thanks, I’ll give that a shot, but I’m specifically looking to paste into a web form, so it’d sure be nice if this functionality worked natively from Scrivener without having to have an extensive work-around…
If you copy some text from Scrivener and paste into another document in Scrivener, do you get full formatting?
If so there is nothing more we can do. It is up to other programs to correctly interpret the text correctly. That isn’t something we have any direct control over; best we can do is make sure the formatting we do provide is as commonly accepted as possible. And like I say, that’s not a clear cut thing on iOS. The system is fractured and hardly anything uses standards. If we make it work for the one thing you’re trying to do—assuming we even can—it will very likely break everything else it currently works with.