Odd issue with copy and paste

[jquinn33]

Hi!

We are noticing a repeatable issue with copying and pasting and it is only happening when we do a Rich Text paste (not HTML) which we use to maintain formatting. This is a medical site and we are noticing this issue with things like:

Copying “M.D.” will paste as “D.”
Copying “B.Sc.” will paste as “Sc.”

Here is a link to a quick video capture showing what’s happening when we copy from a Word document to a Rich Text element.

We also noticed it only happens when “M.D.” or “B.Sc.” etc. are bulleted text AND those designations are at the beginning of the text. For example:

• M.D. – Yale University pastes as • D. – Yale University

• Received M.D. – Yale University pastes as • Received M.D. – Yale University

We would love if this could be resolved as we keep missing pasting errors.

Thank you!

[ruenel]

Hello @jquinn33,

Thanks for writing in! We have tried to replicate the issue in our local testing server. We do not see any issue at all. Please check out this video screencast.

Copy Paste

Please make sure that you have the latest WP core, Pro theme, and MSWord. There must be something in between on how the MSWord software has copied the text. We recommend that you copy the text in MS Word, create a new Word document, and then paste the text into the new document.

Best Regards.

[jquinn33]

Thank you, Ruenel!

This is such an odd thing! We are definitely using the latest versions of WP, Pro theme and MS Word on our network. I tried your suggestion of creating a new Word document, then copying/pasting from that. No difference. I even created a brand new Word document and simply typed the following lines:

Test
• M.D. – Yale University
• Other text
•

No difference. I also tried on my Mac, wondering if it might have something to do with Word for Windows, but opening a new document (in the latest Mac version of Word) and typing in the above lines still produced the same issue when pasting into a new text block on the site. Looking at the HTML code after I paste into Rich Text, I see nothing unusual. The above Rich Text shows in HTML as:

<p>Test</p>

<ul>
 	<li>D. – Yale University</li>
 	<li>Other text</li>
 	<li></li>
</ul>

The only thing I tried that did convert the text correctly was to go to an online “Word to HTML” converter (wordhtml.com). When I pasted my Word text into the “Word Editor” window on that site, then selected and copied it from that same “Word Editor” window and pasted into a new text block on my site, it pasted correctly. So I’m not sure if it is a Word issue or a Pro issue, but here is a work-around (even though it’s an extra step) to make sure copying/pasting works correctly!

Could I ask you to try testing a Word copy/paste on our server to see if the results are the same as on your local testing server?

Thank you again!

[christian]

Hey @jquinn33,

This could be an issue with character encoding in your MS Word and that encoding could not be accepted by your WordPress character encoding.

What happens when you use “Word to HTML” is it cleans the character encoding and everything else stripping the text down to standard encoding which I believe is UTF-8.

You really need to use the Word to HTML site. This is not an issue with Pro and might not even be an issue with MS Word per se. There might be a setting in MS Word that you must disable. Regretfully, we cannot investigate MS Word as it’s beyond the scope of theme support.

Thank you for understanding.

[jquinn33]

Thanks so much for the reply, Christian! I will look at the default Word settings on both of our production machines and report back if I find any solutions! Thank you again for taking the time to explain! Themeco has the absolute BEST support around!

[prakash_s]

You are most welcome @jquinn33