Comment by podperson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by podperson | Hacker News Reader

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"Paste and match formatting" shouldn't be necessary for most programs, and isn't a platform standard. Paste is command-V. A sensible application should do the most likely thing the user wants with paste and overload the shortcut for weird stuff. The fact that Microsoft consistently does the weird thing by default isn't a platform problem with the Mac, just with Word.

Now you could point out Pages has the same shortcut and same stupid behavior. I agree, but that's what happens when there's a clear market leader.

(Oddly enough, I've been implementing a web-based word processor, and we make paste-and-match (paragraph) style while retaining (character) styles the default. You can't actually do this in Word or Pages — default or not — despite the fact it's what users want 99% of the time. So if I paste some text with an italicized passage, the font changes to match the ambient styling, but the italics remain. When we implemented it, the UX people were flabbergasted -- they assumed it must be impossible because no word-processor does it.)

"Paste and match formatting" shouldn't be necessary for most programs, and isn't a platform standard.

Yes, it is. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx... says "Table A-2 lists the system-reserved and commonly used keyboard shortcuts mentioned in the rest of this document."

Table A-2: contains ../art/ks_option_2x.png ../art/ks_shift_2x.png ../art/ks_command_2x.png V Apply the style of the surrounding text to the inserted object (equivalent to the Paste and Match Style command). See “The Edit Menu.” That links to https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx..., which describes the command, too.

I disagree with the claim that this is a bad choice, though. It may not be optimal if starting from a tabula rasa, but Apple did not do that when it introduced the combination, five years ago or so, in my memory. By that time Command-V has done styled paste for about 25 years, making it difficult to dethrone.

We must be glad that we have a standard for this, not angry that it may be a bit complex to type.

OK I didn't know Apple had made that a standard -- so I agree with the GP that it's dumb. If I can't easily type a shortcut with one hand, it shouldn't be a standard shortcut.

I'm suggesting the standard paste should behave as expected, not adhere to some literal definition the user doesn't care about. If I copy a passage of text from one document and paste it into another, I generally want it to look like it belongs in the destination document but I don't want to lose obvious intentional styling such as italicization.

The common case should be the easy case. Instead we have the common case and the four-fingered shortcut both doing the wrong thing. Awesome.

I think implementing "obvious intentional styling" is an AI problem. Suppose you copy a header, click in a normal paragraph, and paste. Keep styling information? Case 2: copy styled text from Keynote, and paste. Keep styling?

Maybe, the logic in a word processor should be to keep character styling, but not paragraph styling, but I think there will be many edge cases (for example, the user might be using the word processor as a document layout package)

I doubt those edge cases can be programmed away; user intervention is required. Microsoft solves that after the paste. That may be the better solution.

You can't program away edge cases, but the current standard behavior fails in the bog standard common case.

> "Paste and match formatting" shouldn't be necessary for most programs, and isn't a platform standard.

If I copy and paste from a web browser, sometimes I want the formatting and sometimes I don't. It's not an usual case. Places where I use this shortcut include Word, Evernote and Mail. It's just not a sensible key combination.

>If I copy and paste from a web browser, sometimes I want the formatting

The default SHOULD be to lose the formatting of the original and to use the font/style that is in Word. I would think that 99% of time anyone is copying and pasting into Word this is their intended result.

I agree with the other post, it is incredibly stupid to have it keep formatting from the original by default.

Yes. This is a feature where you wonder if whoever though of that shortcut ever used a word processor. Such a bad design choice for such a common action.

This isnt just about copying Word. Mac Mail has the same paste with formatting behavior. As does Evernote for that matter.

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