Copy and pasting text from websites or documents retains the formatting and styling, which is undesirable. Is there a way to paste text as unformatted, or remove the formatting using the toolbar?
Copy and paste retains text styling
Hi, @david47
I have found that the browser's “Paste as plain text” works well to avoid undesirable formatting. I am not aware of a remove formatting option in the article editor's toolbar. This is the right-click menu, within article editor, in Edge (note there is also a keyboard shortcut):
In Chrome, I found it worked to right click, then “Paste and Match Style” to get rid of the formatting from the other source.
This issue significantly slows down our process of adding articles to the Help Center. We create all of our articles in Google Docs first so they can be reviewed and edited, then we copy-paste them into Zendesk. Copy-pasting into Zendesk was always a challenge – there was always extra work we had to do to make sure articles look as desired/expected after pasting into Zendesk – but the EAP has made this much more laborious; a full new article possibly takes twice the amount of time to create as it did previously.
To avoid Zendesk importing the formatting from G-Docs (as well as formatting we aren't even using in the G-doc – the EAP turns all of my copy-pasted text bold), we have to use the ‘paste without formatting’ option, which means we have to add back every bit of styling – every application of bold or italics, every heading, every bullet (for bullets, we first need to add a paragraph break for each line since all lines come in with just <br> tags), and more.
If I paste in normally (preserving formatting), then I can use the “Clean up styles” option in the HTML editor afterwards, but then that mysterious application of bold text still remains, along with other stylings that aren't visible in the preview but makes the HTML more complex than it should be.
Here is the difference between text I added directly in Zendesk and text I copy-pasted in. (Note that the original G-doc text has no bold):
I am happy to inform that we fixed issue related to the extra lines being added on paste.
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