RoboHelp 9 - HTML Clipboard Paste

You can now copy and paste from HTML pages and RoboHelp will paste lists, hyperlinks and tables with the formatting preserved. Tables and other content from Microsoft Word can also be pasted in.

You can then choose to accept the original format or align it to the styles in your project.

Opinion

This is useful and I welcome its introduction, particularly the ability to paste in tables. What you must not expect is that what you get is perfect in every instance. Most times it will work just fine but sometimes it will need a little bit of tweaking.

Pasting from Word

When you paste from Word, you get HTML written as if you saved the document in HTML format. From experience we know the way Microsoft writes the HTML is not the way we want it and it does not always give you what you want in the output. It is easily fixed though by applying your required styles from your stylesheet.

You can also apply your existing tables styles.

In short, if what you get after pasting in is not quite what you want, it is easily fixed.

Pasting from HTML

What you get will depend on the HTML

I selected this text from Adobe's site.

When pasted in, this is what I got.

So why the difference? Simple, the source CSS file and the CSS for this page are not the same.

The HTML for the source title was <h2 class="support-section-title"> and the class is not supported in the CSS used in this page. The class was simply ignored and in most cases would not be a problem. Similarly the links were defined as a list style that did not include bullets. That list style does not exist in the CSS used here so the default was applied.

Opinion

A good new feature, particularly the ability to paste in tables as requested by many authors over the years. HTML is CSS dependant so a perfect transform cannot be expected in every case and that has to be accepted. I have found it useful already and will be using it. Nonetheless, I would like to see the option to paste in unformatted content added. Sometimes vanilla is a good choice. Meantime, my thanks to Rick Stone for finding this little tool from www.stevemiller.net/puretext/.