Pasting text from HTML into draft puts text into narrow right column

Scrivener
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I’m using a very old version of Scrivener on Windows 10 (Version: 1.9.16.0 - 14 Nov 2019). I pasted text from a forum that uses HTML into a new draft window, and the text, which looked normal in the other forum, squeezes into a long, narrow column at the right of the window. Each line contains about 20 characters. FYI, the margins are tiny–about 1 / 16 of an inch. I can’t get the text to flow across the full page, and if I paste some text a few lines below the existing text, it is still narrow and right-aligned. I tried clicking “center,” and each line of text centered in that same narrow column. Any suggestions (hopefully without changing my version of Scrivener)?

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What happens if you paste it in using control-shift-v ?

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Probably there is a hidden table. Web pages often use tables for formatting.

I don’t have that version of Scrivener handy, so I’m not sure of the exact commands, but look for the Show Invisibles command to see if table formatting exists, and Remove Table to get rid of it. Probably on the View and Formatting menus, respectively.

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I tried OwenKelly’s suggestion first, since it was simpler. It worked! Many thanks to both of you.

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Just for future note, as these can sometimes be less obvious and you don’t notice there is a table until compiling and get weird borders around text or pages that don’t wrap right, you can always retroactively get rid of them by right-clicking into the area that is acting odd, and looking for a “Table” submenu. If you see that, you’ll find a “Remove Table” command within it.

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Thank you so much! This is at the drafting-in-Scrivener stage, not the compile stage. I’m copying in material as research notes. But thank you again.

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Always Paste-and-Match style when pasting web material, rather than using regular Paste. HTML has lots of hidden structure — none of which you want in your capture of bits of research material.

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On my Macs I switched the keyboard shortcuts for Paste and Paste-and-Match-Style over for most apps via System Preferences > Keyboard as in 99.999999…% of times I want PaMS. In the same way I switched the default shell in Terminal from Apple’s version of zsh to bash.

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