Is there a way to keep the format of my document when copying and pasting from TextEdit to Safari? It will copy from Safari into TextEdit with the formatting intact, but will not copy from TextEdit to Safari with the same formatting. It just jumbles into one big paragraph.
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Kathryn D.
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How Do I Keep TextEdit Format When Pasted Into Safari?
Comments: 5 Responses to “How Do I Keep TextEdit Format When Pasted Into Safari?”
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Interesting question. The problem is that Safari is not a document editing program. True, you can paste text into things like forms, but that's it. A web page form is a simple thing: fields and text fields. Originally these were not meant to handle anything but plain text. And in some ways that is still the case.
Now some advanced sites, like maybe a blogging system or Google Docs, let you format text. But that's all supported by code on the web page. So whether you can paste rich formatted text into a form's field depends on whether the page support it. In fact, it may be that no web page out there is sophisticated enough to support the pasting of rich text.
So what web page form are you trying to paste text in to?
I am enrolled in an online school for transcription and I like to have the document in TextEdit with the formatting and then paste onto the school's page. The problem is that I lose all my formatting when I paste. Am I understanding correctly that there really isn't any way to change this?
Sounds like the form on the school's page is causing the issue. What happens when you try to paste the same text into a Google Doc (most complex web form I can think of).
If I understand this correctly, Kathryn is attempting to copy rich text-formatted text onto a web page that is looking for either plain text or html-formatted text.
If the latter, you need a rich text->html converter. Although not designed specifically for that purpose, you can use Marked (available in the Mac App Store for a couple of bucks) to do this quite easily. You can read about Marked here:
http://markedapp.com/
If the field into which you're pasting the text is looking for plain text only, you can still use Marked but you won't be able to preserve the formatting beyond line and paragraph breaks.
As an alternative, you can use TextEdit to convert the text to plain text before copying and pasting into the entry field of your school's web page. You'll lose most formatting, but at least you'll be able to see what you'll be pasting into that field before you do it, and can edit it as needed within TextEdit before doing so.