At times, when I copy text selections from a web page, then paste into a Scrivener document all the pasted text is blue and underlined. It’s looks like one long web link.
I have tried to open the Styles pane window and clicking on the Remove Styles button at the bottom, with no effect.
#1. Pasting copied text should do so while preserving the source formatting as much as possible.
#2. There should be a paste option to paste just PLAIN TEXT.
#3. In general, changing styles is clumsy and not always reliable.
a. One Big Link. I think we’re all familiar with the “one big long link” problem. Scrivener has no idea what the original writer intended, and makes no assumptions. Not all webpage coding is clean or good. Some of it’s pretty bad. Scrivener does not correct bad HTML. I don’t think it even closes unclosed HTML codes (could be wrong, but I don’t think it does).
BTW, to get rid of that huge long link, you don’t want “remove style,” because there’s a good chance there isn’t one to remove (the wonders of “No Style”).
So select all that text you just pasted, right click, and “Unlink” (top of the menu).
b. Pasting plain text. Scrivener does this; it’s called “Paste and Match Style.” If you’ve not changed the keyboard shortcuts, it’s Shift-ctrl-V.
c. Changing Styles. As far as changing styles goes, perhaps you could explain what you mean by your statement? I have “No Style” set to a particular format. If I change some text to, say, “block quote,” it changes. If I then change it back to “No Style,” it changes back to “No Style.” In that respect, it’s fairly reliable. I don’t care for “No Style,” but according to the devs, it solved a huge number of problems in the compile stage to do that instead of having Word-type styles.
So perhaps you can explain what you mean? Examples would be helpful.
Thank you for the explanations. It does help to understand what the software is trying to do. Here’s my further comments:
#1. One big link issue — Ok, I agree that many web pages are poorly coded. Scrivener trying to correct selected-and-copied web page text would be a pain for your programmers to implement and I’m sure you have higher priorities. However, If MS Word, Gmail editor and many other text editors can do a decent job of displaying text that was pasted from a web page, I suggest Scrivener can eventually also improve the user’s experience with this use case.
In the mean while, I will use your “unlink” suggestion.
#2. Shift-CTRL-V — Many thanks for this. I’m still learning Scrivener. I’ll use this when the pasting of text gives poor results.
#3. Changing text styles — Because I’m still learning to use Scrivener, it might be my lack of experience. What I’m referring to is akin to #1 above. Text will change to a style (font or size) that’s not desirable, especially when pasting text from another source. My attempts to correct the style or make it consistent with the rest of my document fail. Specifically, if I select text that was pasted and try to change the font, or the size, or color… such text doesn’t change.
It could be that the source of my CTRL-C (copy) has formatting errors that result in pasted text in Scrivener being unresponsive to my attempts to style or format it. Again, if I can copy-and-paste the same text into Word or my Gmail editor or other text editors with satisfactory results, I hope Scrivener can do the same when out of the Beta test cycle.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Scrivener 3. I’m just reporting what I see as bugs or glitches, based on my 25+ years of using and developing software. These are issues I struggle with every day. I would think others are having the same experience.
A Feature Request (or this might be a clarification about how to do this) — Am I able to insert hyperlinks within text that would take me to another part of my document or project when clicked?
About linking to other documents select the text you want to use as an anchor, right click and navigate to “Link to Document” and select any of the documents in your project. This will create a link to your selected document. Clicking the link anchor will load the document in the other editor pane.
I’m sure they can. I don’t know what priority it is.
Sometimes this is formatting error in the source. Sometimes the text contains “stuff” that somehow prevents Scrivener from restyling it. (I have no idea what, though)
A suggestion: when you next FIND such a source, post the copy (or a link to your copy) here and tell the nice programmers that Scrivener won’t restyle it after pasting, and let them figure out why.
FWIW. I paste such things into Notepad++. I save the file with a date in the filename and a hint about the problem (like 2019Feb11-ScrivNotStyling.txt). I upload to Google Drive, get a shareable link, and post the link here.