Text insanity

crandallm

Making the transition from Lectora 11 to Lectora Online and I am bewildered by some of the errors I am encountering.



First, I cannot seem to successfully copy and paste text. If i do a straight copy & paste my text ends up with a grey background that does not show up in any of the text formatting options within Lectora. I have looked at it in Chrome developer and can find the mysterious background color added: "background-color: rgb(153, 153, 153)"



If, on the other hand, I do a cmd+shift+v to paste unformatted text I get text pasted in arial size 10 -- which is not my default style. And when I try to change the font by highlighting it and selecting my custom font settings it will at best change one letter to my selected style.



If I try to use the Paste tool in the upper left, it makes me paste the text in a box because it says my browser security settings don't allow access to my clipboard (don't know how to fix this--using chrome). And when I do all that, I am once again left with arial size 10 font that I cannot change to my desired font. (Oh yeah, when I paste text in the paste box it shows up with the grey background as well.)



Any help would be welcome.

ssneg

I haven't touched Lectora Online in a long time, so I got myself a trial access and tested it just now. I'm on latest Chrome on Mac OS Yosemite.



Didn't notice anything like the problems with copying and pasting text you described. I can copy text from MS Word 14.4.3 that is formatted in any crazy way and paste it into Lectora. Here's what happens:



1. Set Lectora's default title text to: red Times New Roman, 16pt.



2. Type some Word text and set it to: bold, green, Courier New, 20pt, highlight yellow.



3. Copy and paste it into Lectora with Cmd+V.



4. In Lectora, it's black Arial 10pt bold. In other words, only attributes such as bold or italic are retained. Font-face, size, highlight and color are ignored. Also, the default title font settings are ignored.



5. Now paste it with Shift+Cmd+V. In Lectora, it's black Arial 10pt normal. In other words, all attributes of the original text are ignored (as expected). But the default title font settings are ignored, again, too.



6. Finally, go to Design > Default title text settings and change the default color to blue. Apply everywhere? Yes, please. Here's what happens: All default text that was typed directly in Lectora turns blue. The text that was pasted with Cmd-V stays black. The text that was pasted with Shift+Cmd+V sometimes stays black and sometimes turns blue.



In other words, no, I don't see the topic starters problems at all. Try changing browsers, copying from a different doc and so on. BUT here's what I would like to see (if I were an average e-learning developer who spends a good deal of his time copying text from Word into Lectora AND if anyone from LO team gets this):



1. When I copy with Cmd-V, the text should retain as much attributes from Word as possible (size, font face, color). It should not react to changes in default Lectora font at any point.



2. When I copy with Shift-Cmd-V, the text should assume the attributes of the text at the cursor position, just like "Paste and match formatting" works. If the cursor position was at Lectora's default text or in an empty textbox, it should also assume the "default text" property and then (and only then) react to changes in the default text in the title.



Hope this helps.



P.S. Lectora Online on Retina Mac - absolutely gorgeous! Well done!

wheels

In Lectora Online we use HTML to format the text. We use a very rigid syntax of HTML (at this time) for formatting text, we do this so we can later talk to Lectora Desktop which uses RTF formatting. For conversion we need to know what to expect.



This sometimes is apparent when pasting into a text block because:



1. Formatting from other applications may not adhere to our syntax and we strip off that formatting.

2. Other applications may have some of our attributes (like a light gray background color) and we carry those along on a regular paste, even though it might not have been expected.



As we work toward better integration between the products hopefully we will not need the syntax. Then we can support HTML and css to the fullest extent inside our text blocks, allowing full control and access to the underlying HTML structures if desired. That's where we are going.



For now there are a few tips I have for working with text when it's not behaving:



1. In Chrome there can be some weirdness in selecting things (in a text block). I noticed that I need to be very careful to end the selection (mouse up) inside of the text block. If I select and keep the mouse button down until the mouse is outside the text block, then mouse up, it does select the text, but then formatting is not applied to it.



This is only a Chrome thing and yes annoying. The text does show highlighted and you would expect changes to be applied but they do not get applied. If you then re-select and are careful to ensure you let the mouse up while inside the text block, it will work. We are looking into this, but it only happens on Chrome which makes it a little harder to track down.



2. When things go bad with formatting sometimes I highlight the entire text I want to format, then do a cut cmd-c and a paste unformatted cmd-shift-v. Then I re-select and apply the formatting. I don't find myself doing this often but it usually gets me past any issues I'm having if things are not formatting how I want them too.



3. Each browser presents some different challenges in the way they handle copy/paste. If you are really having trouble in one browser try another and see if your experience is better. This might be a way to making life easier!



Again, I want to tell you that we hear you. The Lectora Online product manager is always on us about text and making it easy to work with. This will get better as we work to bring our desktop and our online products closer together.



Absolutely report any problems you see to [email protected], we might not be able to fix them but we do push them through to Product Management so they know what's going on and focus efforts accordingly.



Thank you for using Lectora Online, and providing this feedback, we are committed to continually improving it!

crandallm

Thanks for the responses.



The problem I am having is with copying and pasting text from within a text box in Lectora Online. In both Chrome and Safari when I paste the text it has a grey background. I have attached screenshots demonstrating this.



The second issue I was having (formatting the text once it has been pasted) was cleared up by Wheels. I was trying to highlight the specific parts of the text box that needed to be adjusted and format the text but it wouldn't work. Apparently this is an issue with Chrome (though I believe I had the same problem with Safari, but can't check right now as I am on the work computer and not my mac). The formatting does seem to work if I select the text box itself and apply the formatting to the entire box.



I just tried it in Firefox and didn't have any of the trouble I had with Chrome and Safari. I probably should have tried that sooner but for some reason I always forget to try Firefox. So I guess I'll use Firefox until the issues with Chrome have been resolved.



Again, thanks.



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