How do I paste copied text cleanly, exactly

Scrivener
1

I’m trying to copy and paste text from one program into Scrivener on MacOS without it adding lots of “returns” or I presume paragraph markers. I’m trying to copy exactly what is in the one program into scrivener. Without the extra line returns. Can this be done? Thanks

2

Without knowing more about the source or its underlying format, it is hard to give any definite answers, but…

  1. It might be your problem would be solved simple by using Paste & Match Style when you paste. This will more or less pare down what you get to just the textual content. (You say you want to “copy exactly” what is in the program – so it is unclear just what you are aiming for. I am assuming what you really want is the (rich text) textual content.)

  2. Scrivener does not add return characters to text when you paste things. If you are seeing undesirable paragraph breaks upon paste, that is going to be down to what the source program delivered when you said Copy there.

    An example would be copying text from certain pdfs out of Acrobat. When you paste, you will sometimes see a carriage return for every line of text in the original. (I think this probably happens when Acrobat basically OCR’d what was just images of text in order to make the text accessible (copy-able, searchable, etc).)

So, if Paste & Match Style does not turn the trick, I suspect the short answer is going to be ‘No.’ Scrivener does not have a mechanism for picking and choosing among return characters in the copied text stream to weed out ones you consider superfluous. (If the “extra” returns were differently encoded or marked, there may be a way to search and replace them – might require regex to do it. Looking at the paste in BBedit or similar you can example the character codes to see if those “returns” are distinguished in some way.)

I strongly recommend Paste & Match style generally for most things you paste from elsewhere. Some of us have swapped the key commands for that and regular Paste, so as to make Paste & Match Style the default. I also recommend Zap Gremlins for stuff you paste from elsewhere, especially anything html encoded, e.g. from your browser.

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