Paste Unformatted Text

  • New to the WordPress thing and I’m having some problems — maybe just running into some of its limitations.

    The editor (for writing posts and pages) is really sensitive to formatting tags. If I copy text formatted in Word or from a website, it can go berserk!

    For instance, I copied some HTML that I formatted in Dreamweaver and pasted it into the WordPress editor (using the edit HTML source function). The result was not only misinterpretation of the format tags, but it ended up cutting off a big chuck on the sidebar. And it REALLY didn’t like it when I tried to create a form. It totally wouldn’t recognize the tags and kept reformatting my code so that the “submit” button disappeared. Kind of useless to have a form without a “submit” button.

    I also had some text formatted in Word or something, and when I pasted into WordPress it cut off the post and removed a big chuck from the sidebar. Bad news!

    Anyway, this all makes me scared to unleash this monster on some of my more low-tech friends. The goal is to make people self-sufficient. I don’t want panicked phone calls and emails: “Our website is all messed up!”

    When I worked for SEIU, they had a great online website editor (custom made, of course) and it had a “paste unformatted text” button. God, that’s what we need! I remember one of the techie coordinators calling me up when they finally got it — she was so excited, and now I can see why.

    I’ve looked through a lot of WordPress plugins, but I haven’t found a similar fix.

    Please! I need a magic “paste” button that removes all the formatting tags.

    I think for my email form, I can get around the problem by just coding a page completely outside the WordPress editor. I’d like to see if I can use the PHP so that the sidebar updates with the changes I make through WordPress. Alternatively, I could just have a stripped down page that resembles my WordPress theme but is coded just in HTML.

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  • Two “magic” buttons:

    — Paste from Word,
    — Paste as Plain Text.

    They’re part of the more advanced Tiny MCE buttons, but they’re not in the standard install and a bit of a job to get working. Maybe more buttons will be in future versions of WP and Tiny MCE–or at least the options to have them (easily!). Make sure you’re uploading the folder(s) (“paste” is the name of the folder) using the correct version of Tiny MCE.

    They are magic, though, once you get them working!

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