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User profile for user: Birck Cox
Birck Cox Author
User level: Level 2
191 points

In Apple Pages, I'm having a problem copying web text for printing in pages

I'm on a Mac Pro currently running 10.14.6, but I think this was happening in High Sierra as well: I open Pages in order to copy something from the web, e.g., Wikipedia, I highlight the text to be transferred, copy it, and when I click to plant it in Pages, what winds up on the page is either black text without all the blue links, or it's all the blue links without the black text of the article. I first ran into this problem when I copied a section of text with some passages in bold type, and the bold passages appeared in Pages as white characters which I then was forced to fill with black, using the Pages inspector. I've tried trashing the prefs in Pages. No difference. I tried copying the same passages using TextEdit, and it worked fine. Wassup?

Mac Pro

Posted on Aug 6, 2019 4:36 AM

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User profile for user: VikingOSX
VikingOSX
Community+ 2024
User level: Level 10
116,429 points

Posted on Aug 6, 2019 5:19 AM

With Pages v8.1 and macOS Mojave 10.14.6 (18G87), here are your options for preserving attributed text from websites:


  1. Copy/paste attributed text from a website into TextEdit (conversion into RTF), and then in turn, copy/paste the TextEdit content into Pages v8.1. The original attributed text is preserved.
  2. Copy/paste the website attributed text directly into a suitably scaled Pages Text box, and again, the original attributed text will be preserved because it was converted into RTF format.
    1. One can also copy, or cut and paste the Text box content into the body text of Pages v8.1 and the attributed text is preserved.


When I copy/paste the following content onto the clipboard:



the following data types are now on the clipboard:



and because Pages v8.1 does not provide support for HTML, it munges the paste operation. TextEdit, MS Word, (and LibreOffice Writer) understand HTML because they can export it, so that explains why the web attributed text survives into these applications. And the paste directly into a Text box:


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User profile for user: VikingOSX
VikingOSX
Community+ 2024
User level: Level 10
116,429 points

Aug 6, 2019 5:19 AM in response to Birck Cox

With Pages v8.1 and macOS Mojave 10.14.6 (18G87), here are your options for preserving attributed text from websites:


  1. Copy/paste attributed text from a website into TextEdit (conversion into RTF), and then in turn, copy/paste the TextEdit content into Pages v8.1. The original attributed text is preserved.
  2. Copy/paste the website attributed text directly into a suitably scaled Pages Text box, and again, the original attributed text will be preserved because it was converted into RTF format.
    1. One can also copy, or cut and paste the Text box content into the body text of Pages v8.1 and the attributed text is preserved.


When I copy/paste the following content onto the clipboard:



the following data types are now on the clipboard:



and because Pages v8.1 does not provide support for HTML, it munges the paste operation. TextEdit, MS Word, (and LibreOffice Writer) understand HTML because they can export it, so that explains why the web attributed text survives into these applications. And the paste directly into a Text box:


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User profile for user: VikingOSX
VikingOSX
Community+ 2024
User level: Level 10
116,429 points

Aug 6, 2019 6:02 AM in response to Birck Cox

I has nothing to do with the operating system. It is simply that Pages v8.1 does not natively support HTML/CSS codes — so that it can interpret and preserve that formatting when it is pasted. Apple has Objective-C library code that allows an application to detect HTML content on the clipboard, and transform/preserve that into Rich Text (RTF), and that is what TextEdit and the Pages Text box are doing for you. The Pages product team could have used the same coding technique when pasting into body text, but omitted it. You can provide feedback to the Pages product team from your Pages application menu.


As for boxed text on a website, it all depends on how the developer styled the box that will determine if you can simply select the box contents, or the selection spills out of the box collecting other rubbish. I have styled this boxed text so that only the text within the box is selectable, and it pastes normally into the Pages v8.1 body text.



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User profile for user: Birck Cox
Birck Cox Author
User level: Level 2
191 points

Aug 6, 2019 5:41 AM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks for the news. So what I am calling a problem is built into the combination of Mojave and Pages 8.1? I tried the process copy-paste into TextEdit, then copy-paste from TextEdit to Pages, and that did work for transferring regular text from Wikipedia, but I also saw the problem transferring boxed text. Is there some way in which this is an improvement over the last Pages update? Better yet, is there an Apple article about how this all works and what I can do? And thank you for clarifying the whole thing-and suggesting the solution.

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In Apple Pages, I'm having a problem copying web text for printing in pages

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