copy or paste and jump to the first character

Question

Level 1

0 points

copy or paste and jump to the first character

In pages 5.6.3 in 10.10.3 on 15inch MacBook Pro (early 2011). I get what appears to be a consistent bug with copy, cut and paste. The input documents are .docx from a recent Word version on Mac. Copying, cutting, or pasting will move the cursor to the first character of the document. Really annoying behavior when working with documents with thousands of words. It may have something to do with track changes.

I'm becoming so fed up with Pages, that i am investigating other word processors. Previous iWork suite apps were great, now they are horrid. This may be the straw.

MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011), OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Jun 30, 2015 9:01 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Jun 30, 2015 9:55 AM in response to ppm6

It is Pages v5.5.3 on 10.10.3. I don't have Office for Mac 2011 installed, but I do have Office 2016 for Mac Preview installed with latest updates. A copy and then paste, or paste and match style into Pages always places the insertion point after the pasted text — not before the first character in the document.

I don't recall anyone else posting here since Oct. 2013 — stating that they have had your issue pasting from Word into Pages v5.

As for investigating other word processors, if you are exchanging documents with Office 2010/2013 users on a PC, then stay with the latest update of Word on the Mac. That means keeping the Office for Mac 2011 updates current. This is the only way that you can generate/edit Word documents in their native document format that won't introduce martians for the PC users.

Reply

Answer 2

ppm6 Author

Level 1

0 points

Jun 30, 2015 12:55 PM in response to VikingOSX

This is clearly a bug. I don't know how else to file a bug report.

A word processor should always put the insertion point after the pasted text. Pages does not do so (under somewhat weird conditions). That is a bug.

I would guess that the edit table loses the cursor position in docx files when those files are complex. The ones I am working with have had Track Changes in Word (and then in Pages) running for a ridiculous number of editing cycles using multiple versions of Word and Pages on multiple machines with several users. My guess is that the edit table then becomes very long, and when the cursor tries to figure out where to go, it miscounts the number of characters and backs up past the begining of the document. (Ok, so docx has all the insertions as xml elements, but the same idea applies, somehow the cursor position is getting misrepresnted.)

When I saw this the first time, I thought there was bad data in the xml. But now I have seen it with 3 distinct documents. So I don't think it is document specific. It could be that another app is corrupting the xml, but when I open the doc in Word, it seems ok (not thoroughly tested).

It seems to me that a git-like document library system would be a good solution. I just can't get my group interested.

Reply