Copying formatted text

[Martin Wynne]

The text editor in HX uses HTML for formatting. I know that because formatted text can be copied out of an object and pasted into a WYSIWYG HTML editor just fine.

But there is no way back! It's not possible to paste formatted text into an object. In fact it is not even possible to copy and paste formatted text from one object to another, or into the next line on the same object.

It would be useful to be able to do this. After creating a chunk of formatted text in one object, and wishing to move it from say a rectangle to a callout, or use it as a Text object, if it gets pasted back in as plain text it has to be formatted all over again.

Unless I'm missing something obvious?

(Well there is a way -- change the .xplain extension to .zip, unzip it, edit the XML in Notepad++, copy and paste from one object to another, hopefully without making a mistake, save the edited XML, zip it up again, change the extension back to .xplain, lose the will to live. )

cheers,

Martin.

[Alexander Halser]

Pasting formatted text is currently not possible. It's on the wish list, but this requires a lot of additional work.

The HTML editor for the text objects does support copy/paste of formatted text. You can even copy something from a word processor it will stay formatted text. And that exactly is the problem: with copy & paste, you can do more harm than good, because there is (yet) no validation of the pasted HTML. In theory, the HTML editor handles pretty much everything that HTML5 has to offer. But we must not allow everything possible, for we have to make sure that the HTML contains strict pairs of <div></div>, <p></p> or <ul></ul> tags and this HTML shouldn't have to much inline CSS, only that which is really required. That's not necessarily the case when you paste formatted text from another source.

There is a (well hidden) HTML edit option in the right-click menu that opens a primitive HTML source editor. This was originally a debug option, but we decided to keep it. In case something goes wrong, one can use the HTML editor to tidy up the source. You can also use this HTML editor to experiment with your own HTML code. Or to copy/paste formatted HTML. Be careful with HTML source editing, because it is easily possible to really mess up an entire presentation. For example, if you open the HTML editor and add several opening <div><div><div><div> tags at the end, you won't see anything strange in edit mode. In edit mode, this is a small self-contained HTML document. But when you export this to a HTML slideshow, it messes up the HTML structure of other objects that follow this one.

[Martin Wynne]

There is a (well hidden) HTML edit option in the right-click menu that opens a primitive HTML source editor.

Thanks Alexander, I missed that.

That's great. I have a lot of formatted callouts in videos which I want to update as Xplains. They are currently formatted as RTF but I can easily convert that to HTML. Much easier than having to format them all again from scratch.

I understand the danger of pasting in random HTML, but it would always be at the user's own risk. If I mess up, I'm not going to be blaming anyone other than myself.

Thanks again,

Martin.

[Alexander Halser]

If I mess up, I'm not going to be blaming anyone other than myself

Well, if you mess up by just pressing CTRL V, it's hard to blame the user. I think we are responsible to get this right.