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Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

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Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#31

Post by eoghann »

sph wrote: post #12
xcambar wrote: post #2

Many users, and maybe most outside HN, either: * don't care about the misformatting * actually want the red font and underlining from the web page they're copying from.

They want the red font more often than they just want the text, and don't get annoyed when their email now is all in red Impact font? These oft-mentioned mythical users that have opposite expectations from their computer than us are a bit like the Sasquatch. Some say they've seen them, but I still don't believe it. :-)

I work with them every day and it's a real struggle :'-)

"Can you show me how to make a chart in Excel again?"

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#32

Post by xcambar »

xcambar wrote: post #24
sph wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want the red font more often than they just want the text, and don't get annoyed when their email now is all in red Impact font? These oft-mentioned mythical users that have opposite expectations from their computer than us are a bit like the Sasquatch. Some say they've seen them, but I still don't believe it. :-)

My family. Their friends. A data point is not a statistic but that's quite a data point for me :D

In all seriousness, I've worked for many years for a company that had as a feature to help clients build knowledge bases. Most of it was done by copy/pasting Word documents into a web page.

Keeping formatting was our #1 requested feature and most demanding task.

So yeah, people want that and companies are built on those jot-so-mythical users and their truly-not-mythical money.

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#33

Post by moralestapia »

Thank you for posting this, I wanted to ask HN about it sometime.

I have no clue why somebody thought this was a good idea.

In 20 years of using computers everyday, I have never, EVER, had the need to copy the source format into whatever thing I'm doing. On the contrary, every single time I open Notepad, paste it there and copy it again ... I know about ctrl+shift+v or something, but I never get it right and also I already have developed muscle memory for Notepad.

Also, who decided that pasting w/ format should be the default behavior, sorry but, wtf.

Is there any real use case for this? Anyone finds this useful? Any scenario where this is actually useful and I'm missing it because I'm not familiar with X?

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#34

Post by moralestapia »

twic wrote: post #29

At least two people want to paste with formatting: https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/17398-clipboard-history-fe... I've seen this question asked again and again. Once, i saw an answer from someone who was a product manager on a big office tool, i think at Microsoft. Their answer was that according to their user research, the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting. Given how often this comes up, and how…

>the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting

Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#35

Post by FabHK »

It seems to me that the general paradigm is that the copy/paste operation copies over everything, if the receiving app supports it, and degrades gracefully, otherwise. In other words: copy over as much as possible.

Mail supports rich text, so that's what's copied.

Agreed though: in the scenario you describe, it's often not what's desired, but that's why there's another key combination to support this use case without breaking the consistency of the general paradigm.

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#36

Post by ineedasername »

>It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to transplant styling/formatting into an email

I do it all the time when I need to email a small table from excel instead of attaching the whole sheet, especially when it's backed by data that should never be sent in an email. It works fine.

I used to not be able to do this. Content didn't paste nicely, or recipient clients didn't display it nicely. These days it's no longer an issue, clients mostly seem to handle it without issue.

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#37

Post by InitialLastName »

moralestapia wrote: post #34
twic wrote: post #29

At least two people want to paste with formatting: https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/17398-clipboard-history-fe... I've seen this question asked again and again. Once, i saw an answer from someone who was a product manager on a big office tool, i think at Microsoft. Their answer was that according to their user research, the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting. Given how often this comes up, and how…

>the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.

If you're moving sections around in a spreadsheet or a word processor, would it be more annoying if the copy/paste kept the formatting or stripped the formatting?

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#38

Post by ghusto »

This! I thought I was going insane, that nobody has mentioned this until now. "When did this start happening?", I thought. But looking into it, it seemed as if it had always been like this -- only of course it hadn't!

It is mind crushingly annoying, second in nerve-o-smashing only to useless mouse over popups all over a UI. "Here, let me just smack a popup over what you're reading because there's now about 0.2cm of the screen you can place your mouse that _doesn't_ do that. What does it say? Oh, it just repeats the name of the link it's over".

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