The exact behavior of the Rich Text Editor (RTE) depends on your device, browser, and operating system as well as the source you're pasting from. However, starting with a well-formatted document will help you get the most out of the RTE. Here are some general tips to ensure that as much of your formatting as possible will be retained:
Press Enter once between paragraphs. Pressing Enter twice will insert a blank paragraph, creating additional, and likely unwanted, space between paragraphs when you paste into the RTE. The Archive uses top and bottom margins to create the appearance of a blank line between paragraphs; you can use the paragraph formatting options in your text editor to create a similar effect without adding extra <p> tags.
Use preset styles for headings, block quotations, code, and so on. The Styles option generally found in a text editor's Format menu will often translate into HTML tags when pasting into the RTE. Simply changing the font size, font name, or text indent to create a visual approximation of a heading or block quote will always fail.
Google Drive uses inline CSS to change the alignment of text and to produce bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough formatting. Unfortunately, we cannot allow inline styles on the Archive, so only pure HTML formatting such as headings, lists, links, and tables is retained.
In some browsers, the formatting may appear to be preserved upon pasting into the RTE, but it will be stripped by our HTML sanitizer upon previewing or posting your work.
Scrivener users will typically get better results by pasting into the HTML editor and then switching to the RTE to make changes. To copy HTML from Scrivener, do the following:
Underline and strikethrough are often produced with CSS. Because the Archive does not allow the use of inline CSS, these text styles are frequently lost when pasting.
Pasting from web pages that use <u>, <del>, <strike>, or <s> tags will work.
Text alignment is now generally achieved with CSS, and because the Archive does not allow inline CSS, alignment will often be lost when pasting.
Pasting from sources that use the align attribute and <center> element will keep the formatting intact, but please note that the alignment buttons in the RTE cannot modify center alignment created with the <center> tag.
Text editors use many different styles for their heading presets. For example, selecting Heading 4 in OpenOffice produces italicized sans-serif text. Even when successfully pasting a heading into the RTE, this visual formatting is not preserved -- only the <h4> tag is. This is not a bug. HTML is designed to tell the browser what text means (e.g. "This is a heading") and not how it should be displayed (e.g. "This should be in Arial"). If you wish to modify the style of a heading or any other part of your work, please use a Work Skin.
Indented text is a purely visual effect with no HTML equivalent and will not be preserved. Please use a Work Skin to indent text.