Unable to paste rich text in WP 3.9

ErkV wrote “Hi, in my theme I could enable the wpautop function. This solved the problem of pasting rich text for my site.”

Question: How does one enable wpautop function? Where is it found? How is it enabled?

Thanks

Follow up to previous message:
Pop up says: “if you’re looking to paste rich content from Microsoft Word, try turning this option off. The editor will clean up text pasted from Word automatically” but gives no instruction on how to “try” to turn option off. Please advise.

Found the answer at https://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/#pasting-text

Suggestion: make the On/Off toggle condition OBVIOUS.It is currently too subtle.

Thank you.

I tried pasting from Word (onto a page, not a post) with the paste-as-text option on and off and seem to get the same results — most formatting is lost. In the previous version of WordPress, I could even paste tables from Word and they would look pretty good. It would be great to get this functionality back. The www.remarpro.com developers seem to think that MS Word coding will cause problems when pasted into WordPress. My site has over 100 pages of content pasted from Word and not a single problem. If anyone is listening at www.remarpro.com, please bring the “Paste from Word” function back as an option for those who depend on it. Most WordPress users, like myself, are content creators (formerly called “writers”)and not programmers.

Nobody at WordPress is listening in my view – formerly ink-stained wretch with glue pot and yellow copy paper and now “content creator.” <grin>

Here is the solution: Found the answer at https://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/#pasting-text
The new system works well. Calm down and give it a try.

For debugging purposes, could someone with this problem please post an example Word document of content that doesn’t copy-paste into WP 3.9 properly? Noting what version of Word, and what browser and browser version was causing this problem, would be great as well. Otherwise I doubt the WordPress developers & community have enough to go on to find and fix this bug.

I tested copy-paste from word the other day, and didn’t see any problems whatsoever, except slightly different font.

In response to progammim, here is a test page copy/pasted from MS Word (without selecting the “Paste as Text” button):

https://buildingadvisor.com/wordpress-paste_from_word-test1/

[Moderator Note: Please ensure that you are embedding links correctly in your posts. Link corrected.]

Password to view page: bac_test

I’m using MS-Word 2010 on Win 7 64-bit OS. Browser is Firefox 29.0.1. Also have tried Chrome 35.0.1916.114 m with same results. The posted page includes bold heads, hanging bullets, and two tables — one with a visible grid, one with no grid. I’d be happy to share the original Word doc, but not sure how to do that on this forum. Any suggestions?

Thanks for following up on this.

Also in response to programmin’s suggestion, please compare https://s464925280.onlinehome.fr/?page_id=608 (before updating to WordPress 3.9) with https://s464925280.onlinehome.fr/?page_id=3018 (after updating).

Both texts were transferred directly from Word 2007 rich text documents and appear the same on Firefox 29.0.1 and Internet Explorer 11. It makes no difference if the paste as text button is on or off.

The solution that works for a non html savvy user like me is to copy a rich text already posted, paste it on a new page and overwrite it: https://s464925280.onlinehome.fr/?page_id=2935. Takes an age, but it works, with a few tweaks…

Try pasting the word text into pastebin.com

An observation. The formatted version has 4928 css errors. The non-formatted version has 92 css errors.

@sbb If that page you linked is missing deleted paragraphs or content or formatting from the original Word document, we can’t see what is missing. It’s just plain normal HTML. Could you please upload and link the original word document file on that page?

@hazelfrance How much of the formatted page was pasted from Word? I see the formatted version has gobs of invalid HTML, which causes the page to load much slower than the other, but the images look like they were added by WordPress?

If the only problem is MCE4 is just not transferring formatting that is within those odd proprietary word-xml-tags, that’s probably an enhancement that could be overridden by a plugin in the future?

There’s one other thing you could try – I was noticing a couple annoying bugs that were fixed by manually replacing the TinyMCE version WordPress is using. (There are currently dozens of bugs fixed in versions newer than the wordpress’ TinyMCE 4.0.21, as you can see here: https://www.tinymce.com/develop/changelog/?type=tinymce ) If one of these bugs is causing paragraphs to get deleted, these steps may fix it:

First go into your /wp-includes/js/tinymce/ folder through FTP

Next go to here and download the first link, extract the tinymce.min.js

Copy that JS over the wordpress file. Now you can see the .26 version from the F12 console, by entering “tinymce.minorVersion”

If it doesn’t work or is worse, clicking “reinstall wordpress” should bring back current wordpress 3.9 and its older TinyMCE editor.

By jove, I think I’ve got it!
Since hitting the paste text button only toggles rich text vs. plain text off and on, I was tearing my hair out to figure out how to paste anything into visual editor. After much trial and error, it turns out to be just right-clicking and hitting CTRL-V with cursor positioned in the post/page body. (A lot of the formatting is not retained, but way better than re-creating.) I wonder how many people could have been helped by putting this into the tool tip for the paste button.

@ava I’m not sure I understand. Is this hard-to-find bug triggered by right click, and then ctrl+v pasting? Or is that the only paste functionality that worked for you?

It would be helpful if those affected with this bug could try the WP 4.0 beta, which includes TinyMCE 4.1.2. This version is much newer than the one included in 3.9, as you can see in the TinyMCE changelog there were around 100 bugs fixed between the new release and old 4.0.21.

The paste icon on the toolbar actually used to open a dialog box that instructed you to paste text into itself using CTRL + V. Now that same icon does nothing except toggle plan text vs. rich text (no dialog box opens), which I think is what caused all the confusion. Now you observe whether the icon is in plain or rich text mode, toggle if necessary, then paste directly into the visual editor using CTRL + V. However, it does a very poor job of preserving the formatting from Word docx.

Didn’t work at all. I’m using a business copy of word 2013 of at portal.office.com from windows 7 and Chrome on my desktop. Standard wordpress install with the genesis theme. I created a simple 7×7 table in Word. Ctrl-A, Crtl-C, Ctrl-V into a new wordpress post. The table formatting is stripped out. You get a long vertical column. Saving the word docx as HTML then viewing source on the html file and Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C in the source document and then ctrl-V into a new wordpress post as text and it worked fine when i switched over to the visual view.

I would say this is a massive productivity waste around the world. ?? I spent an hour looking at bad advice in wordpress forums. And annotations of countless other people going down dead ends. Maybe a billion in productivity lost worldwide? It would be better to say that Word no longer works with WordPress and let the chips fall where they may.