Advanced paste formatting

[thelitigator]

Hello all!

 

Still pretty new here but posted my first question yesterday and got great help, so going to try again today. 

 

I'm hoping to customize how text is pasted from my Alfred clipboard (or on my machine in general). Here's the scenario I have in mind. I am constantly pasting blocks of text from pdf documents into Word docs. The problem--as I'm sure many of you have experienced--is that it reads the end of each line in the pdf as a hard carriage return, thus adding a bunch of line breaks in Word that I then have to delete manually. Not optimal. 

 

Also, I want the default to be to paste plain text with no formatting. Again, as i'm sure you've all experienced, other kinds of paste (e.g., keep formatting or match formatting) have a high rate of error. 

 

So, putting those together, I'd like to set up my system so that when I paste an item from Alfred clipboard, it always pastes as plain text and replaces all hard carriage returns with a simple "space.' Is this possible? 

 

To be clear, I would totally happy to implement a system where the paste function on my computer ALWAYS works this way. I would prefer to paste text in plain text with carriage returns removed all the time as opposed to the way it works now. 

 

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

[Stephen_C]

I rather suspect this is a "feature” of MS Word. Fortunately the days are long past when I had to use Word but if I copy and paste from a pdf into LibreOffice I do not experience the problem you mention.

 

Word must have the ability to paste as plain text so surely all you need to do is to use the relevant command in word to do that—or am I overlooking something obvious?

 

Alfred does save plain text to the clipboard so the problem is not with what Alfred saves but, rather, how Word interprets it…at least, that's my suspicion.

 

Stephen

[Stephen_C]

You may also find interesting this current thread on the DEVONthink forums which is dealing with a closely aligned issue.

 

Stephen