Wanted: The Ultimate Copy and Paste

UPDATE: She's going to use Safari, but only for this task. Due to compatibility issues, she HAS to use Firefox. Even then, she sometimes has to drop into IE 5. If only programmers weren't so lazy. Also, any extra steps won't work because she's got hundreds of these to do within a short time frame. Don, this one's for you :) http://www.netaction.org/msoft/world/table.html Thanks everybody!

"or buys it from some other poor sap and tacks it into their stuff" Just like Apple did with Konfabulator? Oh wait...

View the page source, and copy and paste the HTML

What about Webstractor? http://www.softchaos.com/products/webstractor/overview/ I know that's not a clipboard utility, but sounds perfect for your wife's project.

As was mentioned above, Firefox is the problem. But there is a way around it. In Firefox, she needs to save as "Web Page, complete." Then open the resulting .html file in TextEdit -- she'll get something she can grab web clippings from (be sure the New Document preference is set to RTF). Just copy and paste the stuff you need from TextEdit to Word. It's an extra step, but it will get her what she needs.

First, you should have her try Camino. It is a better browser than Firefox in my opinion, for the Mac anyway. Unfortunately, neither it nor Firefox - not even the latest versions or nightlies - do what you want. And for that matter, neither does Opera 8.5. You could also try OmniWeb - or look for a Firefox extension. But I think you are just stuck with having her use Safari. But to tell you the truth - Safari is a good browser. After she uses it a bit she might like it more... All in all, if having to use Safari is the worst case scenerio - you are still ahead of the game...

Tell her to use NVU as her "word processor" -- www.nvu.com. It's actually an HTML editor but who is the wiser? Also, she is giving a bad view of Macs. If you use the default applications everything works fine. Which browsers did you test with. Did you test with Opera? There also has to be a way to paste special as HTML. --Sam

Opera has the same problem. Still, yeah, Safari works fine. I don't see the problem -- Safari makes it just easy as usinig windows. Plus with paste special you have control over pasting output.

I went digging with Clipboard Viewer (comes with the Developer Tools). Here's the problem: Copying text from Safari results in two main flavors: plain-text and RTF. The RTF includes hyperlinks in it, and the plan text obviously doesn't. Copying text from Firefox results in three main flavors: plain-text, RTF, and HTML. The HTML includes hyperlinks, but the RTF is styled text without hyperlinks. The plain text obviously doesn't include style or hyperlinks. My guess is that Word is preferring the RTF flavor over the HTML flavor, and since Firefox doesn't include hyperlinks in its RTF when you copy, you get the styled text but no hyperlinks. So file a Firefox bug that it doesn't include hyperlinks in its RTF when you copy from it. --Quentin

Looks like a gecko/clipboard bug to me. If you use Mozilla, internally it will copy and paste everything, but when you try to paste it into another app, it loses the tags. Interestingly, if you copy from Firefox and paste into Mozilla, the formatting is intact. So the clipboard format must not be properly formed such that it could be pasted as RTF (or HTML?). Dunno if this is also a problem in Windows. File a bug report...