Copying & pasting formats

Paste style in Pages is used to copy and paste the style of text from one lot of text to another inside Pages only.

To remove the styling of pasted text you use Paste and Match style which then adopts the style at the cursor point.

Copying from web pages carries over a lot of the styling of the original but the xml and table structure of the website may not have a match in Pages. For example nested tables are used a lot in websites for layout and that is not permissable in Pages although a surprising degree still comes through. Another thing is that webpages work within a flexible width which may not fit within the margins in a Pages document and cause the layout to break up.

Some web designers (from PC backgrounds) actually have random line breaks in their text which also falls apart in regular word processing.

To sum up there are countless reasons why a web page won't work inside a word processor/DTP application that is not meant as a browser. heck browsers often have trouble with badly constructed web pages and lay them out differently.

Peter

I tried the page you pointed to and the three words in italic stayed italic when I pasted it into a document.

I see what you mean. The coding for italic on the specific page must be something that Pages can decipher. I first though it had to do with the font used as Lucida Grande doesn't have italic on my machine but that isn't it. Normally pasting from the web you get what you see.

If the italic parts are important just correct it in your document.

Well, it has to do with how the web page is constructed. TextEdit doesn't retain the italic on the page either. Nor AppleWorks, Bean or LibreOffice.