How do you retain text formatting when pasting into Pages?

Question

Level 1

11 points

How do you retain text formatting when pasting into Pages?

Hi

I often copy and paste text into and out of emails. But whenever I paste into Pages it removes all the emboldening or italicisation. Once pasted, the text is all in one style (the one selected when I hit paste).

Generally there is too much text for me to comb through and find each instance. Is there a setting in Pages that I can change to prevent this happening?

I'm using Pages version 5.2.2 on iOS 10.9.4.

Thanks.

MacBook Air, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)

Posted on Dec 11, 2014 3:42 PM

Reply

Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,470 points

Nov 21, 2016 9:46 AM in response to jmonroe91

Select your block of text in Apple Mail, and then drag/drop it onto the Pages document. All attributes (e.g. bold, underline, text color, text highlight, etc.) are preserved in the Pages document.

Drag & Drop places fully attributed paragraph text for Pages v5.6.2 and v6.0.5. In Pages '09 v4.3, the following occurs:

El Capitan (10.11.6)
Full attribute support placed in document as paragraph text
macOS Sierra (10.12.1)
Same as El Capitan, but content is placed inside new text box

Reply

Answer 2

defmuse

Level 1

19 points

Sep 22, 2017 3:41 AM in response to ultimawar

Holy crap, this actually worked. I was trying to copy & paste text from my TEXTEdit document (running OSX El Capitan) to gmail, but gmail kept erasing all my fonts, colour, and other formatting information.

But I switched from Chrome to Safari, and that did the trick. Thank you so much, ultimawar.

Reply

Answer 3

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,470 points

Dec 11, 2014 4:42 PM in response to jmonroe91

On Mavericks 10.9.5, I created some Rich Text in the email compose window. I copied this text to the clipboard. Pressing command+V in TextEdit or Pages v5.2.2 deposits the original Rich Text in the respective application document. No monochrome for me.

From Mail 7.3

To TextEdit 1.9

To Pages v5.2.2

Reply

Answer 4

jmonroe91 Author

Level 1

11 points

Dec 12, 2014 12:07 AM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks for checking this.

I wonder if it worked because you're using the Mail app, rather than Gmail in the browser, like I am. (It's not Gmail specific though - I tried copying from a Live/Hotmail account, too, and had the same problem.) Unfortunately it's inconvenient for me to use Mail.

Also, it's not just text from emails that loses formatting once pasted into Pages; any text I copy in reverts to the formatting specified in the document, even if it's a blank document with generic formatting settings. I can see why they do this - sometimes it's useful for uniformly copying in text from various websites - but I need to be able to turn it off.

Reply

Answer 5

Jeff Shenk

Level 4

3,005 points

Dec 12, 2014 5:46 AM in response to jmonroe91

As Viking pointed out, what you are seeing isn't normal and it isn't something that "they do."

Are you using any kind of clipboard enhancer that might modify the behavior for Copy and Paste?

Does the same thing happen when you paste into TextEdit?

Since your original post mentioned italics and bold, I would note that Pages will not fake those, if the font you are using doesn't really have them.

Reply

Answer 6

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,470 points

Dec 12, 2014 8:24 AM in response to jmonroe91

The reason this Rich Text functionality will work between Apple applications, is that Apple is adding raw, custom Cocoa RTF preamble that precedes the copy/pasted text. This preserves all RTF text attributes in both directions. Non-Apple applications do not use this custom Apple RTF preamble, and thus no RTF attribute preservation will occur during copy/paste operations.

I created a custom, strike-through solution for Apple Mail that gets the raw RTF from the clipboard, and inserts the RTF command for strike-through in the RTF stream, before pasting back to the clipboard, and then back into Mail. In the course of this development, I dumped the raw RTF code, and saw the Apple customization.

Reply

Answer 7

jmonroe91 Author

Level 1

11 points

Dec 19, 2014 9:15 AM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks for your answers, both, and for Viking OSX's research.

I'm not using a clipboard enhancer and yes, this happens when I paste into TextEdit, too. I have tried to paste in from the Mail app and discovered that this turns the italics into standard text but retains any bold formatting.

I did notice one bizarre solution that may shed some more light, however: in my browser I clicked to forward the message and saved the draft in Gmail. I then accessed the drafted forward via the Mail app and copied the text into the document. This way the text retained all its bold and italic formatting.

Can you make any sense of this?

Reply

Answer 8

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,470 points

Dec 19, 2014 9:42 AM in response to jmonroe91

When you accessed that Gmail draft using Apple Mail, and copied the Gmail content to the clipboard, it was accompanied by custom Apple RTF encoding that preserved what you saw in the Gmail message. If in turn, you pasted this content into an Apple application, or a third-party application that has taken pains to use the Apple toolkits to decode this custom RTF (LibreOffice) — the content from that Gmail forwarded message will survive via the clipboard.

Reply

Answer 9

trazko

Level 1

10 points

Nov 21, 2016 5:12 AM in response to jmonroe91

When I copy and paste from Apple notes to pages I lose my bold formatting. Following your discussion it seems like the formatting should be retained. Do you have any additional suggestions that might help?

Reply

Answer 10

trazko

Level 1

10 points

Nov 21, 2016 5:23 AM in response to trazko

In addition I tried sending my Apple notes document to email which maintained the bold formatting but when I copied and pasted it into Pages, the bold was gone. To print from notes get you a document with almost no margin and with huge fonts.

Reply

Answer 11

Mar 31, 2016 12:39 PM in response to jmonroe91

I fixed this by copying text from Safari rather than Chrome. It appears chrome was stripping the formatting from my text.

Reply