I mostly use Scrivener to write academic texts. It’s great: I collect all my PDFs in the research folder, copy all the stuff I need in attached note files with a split screen, then use a split screen again to organize my notes onto the draft.
That involves a lot of copying from PDFs, which always end up being badly formatted. So I use this little application to remove formatting: mailsteward.com/wordwrapper/
Wouldn’t it be absolutely great if this would be automatic ? For those who would like to opt out, it could be a declickable option in the preferences, but for the rest of us it would save us hours and hours of copying, unformatting and pasting !
I think many academics out there, and anyone working intensely with PDF text would enjoy this feature. Just a thought…
Since upgrading to Snow Leopard, copy & paste from PDFs with columns no longer strikes fear into my heart. Cmd-C, Cmd-V, done. No 3rd party apps, no problems (except maybe for the trifling matter of the “meta-data” on each page - useless info like page numbers, journal title, running header, etc - that still get pasted into my document as well. But I haven’t found any application that is smart to enough to actually read my PDFs and know which bits I want and which bits I don’t. Snow Leopard is the closest I’ve found yet) and this feature on it’s own was worth the upgrade price.
I don’t know how much the previous post is relevant to my initial question. I was wondering if there has been any update on the possibility to remove format from copied text?
CMD+SHIFT+V = paste and match style. (ctrl+shift+v if you’re on Windows)
Alternately Documents > Convert > Formatting to default text style will remove custom formatting from already pasted text.
If those are insufficient for your needs, could you post with how they’re insufficient/not what you’re after, and someone may be able to help you come up with a work around.
Dead easy on a Mac. You could do as I do, go to “Preferences —> Keyboard —> Shortcuts —> App Shortcuts”, and either set up a shortcut at System level or click the + button, add a set of shortcuts for Scrivener. Then add a shortcut to your liking for “Paste and Match Style”, like that with the capitalisation.
I have actually made Cmd-V the shortcut for “Paste and Match Style” and Opt-Cmd-V the shortcut for “Paste”.
This is standard shortcut mapping process for Macs. I have made shortcuts for the commands I use regularly where they’re not built in to Scrivener or are awkward combinations, like “Convert Formatting to Default Text Style”, “Page Break” and for various paragraph presets.