preserving italics when copying text from webpage to Word

[Zack]

Hi all -

This may be slightly off-topic, but is there anyway I can preserve
italics when copying text from a webpage to Word 2004? I'm currently
just selecting text from the web page, copying, then pasting the text
into a Word document. However, all italics get lost and it's driving
me crazy to search through a long paragraph trying to find and correct
a single italicized word! Any advice greatly appreciated.

I'm using Firefox as my browser, but could easily use a different Mac
browser if it would make a difference.

Thanks,

Zack

 

[Michel Bintener]

Hi Zack,

could you give us a URL of a website where this is not working? As a general
piece of advice: go to Word>Preferences, General section, and make sure
"Include formatted text in Clipboard" is activated.

Your problem could also be browser-related; what happens if you copy the
same text from Safari into Word?

Hi all -

This may be slightly off-topic, but is there anyway I can preserve
italics when copying text from a webpage to Word 2004? I'm currently
just selecting text from the web page, copying, then pasting the text
into a Word document. However, all italics get lost and it's driving
me crazy to search through a long paragraph trying to find and correct
a single italicized word! Any advice greatly appreciated.

I'm using Firefox as my browser, but could easily use a different Mac
browser if it would make a difference.

Thanks,

Zack

--
Michel Bintener
Microsoft MVP
Office:Mac (Entourage & Word)

***Always reply to the newsgroup.***

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Zack:

Examine the code in one of the problem web pages. How is the italic
applied? If it's a style, you need to import the stylesheet into Word as
well as the text.

Try revealing the Web toolbar, click the Open button and copy the address of
the web page in. That causes Word to open the webpage itself. When it
does, it has moe kinds of formatting available to copy. You then do a Word
to Word copy and the italics should come across.

Cheers

--

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs

+61 4 1209 1410, <mailto:[email protected]> mailto:[email protected]

 

[Zack]

Hi Zack:

Examine the code in one of the problem web pages. How is the italic
applied? If it's a style, you need to import the stylesheet into Word as
well as the text.

Try revealing the Web toolbar, click the Open button and copy the address of
the web page in. That causes Word to open the webpage itself. When it
does, it has moe kinds of formatting available to copy. You then do a Word
to Word copy and theitalicsshould come across.

Thanks everyone for the responses. I tried opening the web pages
within Word using the web toolbar as described above, but consistently
get an error message stating: "Word cannot open the document. Please
check the address and try again."

I'm guessing that the pages may contain some non-standard coding. As
far as I can tell, the italic words are set off with a slash before
and after them, as opposed to the conventional <I> and </I>.

However, for some reason using Safari instead of Firefox solved the
problem. I only wish I'd thought to try this BEFORE spending hours
and hours going over each page and manually inserting each italic!

In case anyone wants to follow up on this, a sample problem page can
be found at http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/delinquents.html --
two words are italicized in the first sentence of the second
paragraph.

Zack

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Zack:

Yep: Mac Word is falling way behind in its ability to open web pages,
currently.

More and more web pages are "active" (i.e. produced by a database of some
kind). URLs ending in .asp, .aspx, .msx, .pgp etc are all suspect. They
require a browser's ability to return a web form containing parameters to
complete the query, and Mac Word does not yet have this ability.

It's one of the enhancments I am hoping for in Word 2008 (which better have
most of it, or it will be unable to open its own documents!).

However, nothing will persuade the world's websites to present plain HTML
any longer, so I guess we're stuck with it.

The downside is that the more of this stuff Word can do, the larger attack
vector it presents to the bad guys. There's currently a brouhaha
surrounding Outlook 2007, which uses Word 2007 as its HTML rendering engine.
There are complaints that it does not properly process some of the encoded
directives in certain emails. Yup! Doing so would leave it wide open to
our "friends" who brought us the recent Animated Cursors exploit

Cheers

--

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs

+61 4 1209 1410, <mailto:[email protected]> mailto:[email protected]