Change paste link behaviour

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Simon Dismore
Posts: 454
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 1:29 pm
Location: London, UK

Change paste link behaviour

Unread post by Simon Dismore »

When I paste an Internet link (e.g. http://alistapart.com) into H&M 7.2.0, an object is created with the values: If I now wish to create a caption for this object, I must move the contents of the Caption textbox down to the Address textbox before entering the new caption. This is an unnecessary step.

Proposal:
  1. Paste the link address into the Address textbox rather than the Caption textbox
  2. Define a dialog variable <%LINK_ADDRESS%> to be the content of the Address textbox
  3. Insert the symbol <%LINK_ADDRESS%> into the Caption textbox.
Thanks for considering this.
tinat
Posts: 223
Joined: Tue Aug 06, 2002 3:35 pm
Location: Auburn, New York
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Re: Change paste link behaviour

Unread post by tinat »

Yes!! I wholeheartedly agree with this. I spend a lot of time having to rearrange the Caption and the Address boxes.
Thanks, Tina
Tim Frost
Posts: 319
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2004 11:45 pm

Re: Change paste link behaviour

Unread post by Tim Frost »

This has my vote also!
Tobias Escher
Posts: 202
Joined: Mon Dec 28, 2015 7:32 pm

Re: Change paste link behaviour

Unread post by Tobias Escher »

add mine to it, too!
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Tim Green
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Re: Change paste link behaviour

Unread post by Tim Green »

A change to the behavior here has been experimentally added to the current beta, which you can get here:

http://download.ec-software.com/help-an ... 0-beta.exe

The modified behavior is now that the dialog initializes the address field with the text from the link caption and resolves this back to <%LINK_CAPTION%> when done, if both values are the same. What this means is that when a link is automatically converted, you get the plain text value of the URL in both fields (caption and address) as a result.

Tidy XML:

This update also includes the first implementation of Tidy XML, which can now be activated in Configuration > Common Properties > Misc. Please ONLY test this on non-production projects, as the changes it makes are not globally reversible and the resulting projects will not be compatible with earlier versions of HM. Applying it significantly reduces the number of tags and attributes in the XML, making translation with external tools a lot easier.

Tidy XML works best if you systematically use styles for everything. As soon as you start applying manual formatting you will effectively get pretty much the same kind of code that you had before. That is unavoidable. Also, if you apply things like Bold, Underline and Italics and then undo them, this will not remove the text tag with the corresponding attributes. For example, setting Bold creates a text tag with the attribute font-weight:bold;. Un-bolding the same text doesn't remove the tag; instead, it changes the attribute to font-weight:normal;. This is necessary because you might be applying this to counter a setting in the style (all the way up the inherited style tree to the final ancestor). If you are working with formatting like this in Tidy mode you need to be aware of this and re-apply the style to the entire paragraph to reset all the internal tags instead of un-bolding.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Simon Dismore
Posts: 454
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 1:29 pm
Location: London, UK

Re: Change paste link behaviour

Unread post by Simon Dismore »

Tim Green wrote:A change to the behavior here has been experimentally added to the current beta
That's great, thanks.
  1. After pasting a bare URL using the new functionality, I'd usually want to change the caption. Would it be possible to put the initial focus on the caption textbox rather than the address, with all the caption text selected? That way I can just overtype without needing to refocus and select.
    [screenshot] Edit Hyperlink dialog focuses on link address.png
  2. When pasting a formatted link copied from a web page I noticed that the Paste plain text functionality <control>+<shift>+<V> has got broken in the beta. It now pastes the formatted text, whereas in 4035 and earlier it would paste only the plain unformatted text.
  3. When pasting formatted links like that, one almost always wants the caption not to remember how it was formatted on the source web page. Ideally <control>+<V> would remove the formatting and simply insert the caption and link using the current paragraph style. On the [rare] occasion one needs to to insert a fully formatted link he would use the Paste > Paste HTML command.
Tim Green wrote:This update also includes the first implementation of Tidy XML
Very nice. I just tried it on the "Getting started" example and the Topics folder shrank 18% 8)
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