Page 386 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION WHEN FORMATTING
IS LOST

How come pasted text doesn’t always look the same as what I copied?

When you copy text from a web browser, for example, and then paste it
into another program, such as Word, the formatting of that text (bold,
italic, font size, font color, and so on) may not reappear intact. In fact,

the pasted material may not even inherit the current font settings in the
word processor. There could be several reasons for this.

First, not every program offers text formatting. Second, the Copy

command in some programs doesn’t pick up the formatting along with
the text. So when you paste into Word or WordPad, you may get plain,
unformatted text.

Finally, a note on text wrapping. Thanks to limitations built into the
architecture of the internet, email messages aren’t like word processor
documents. The text doesn’t flow continuously from one line of a

paragraph to the next, reflowing as you adjust the window size. Instead,
email programs insert a press of the Enter key at the end of each line
within a paragraph.

Most of the time, you don’t even notice that your messages consist of
dozens of one-line “paragraphs.” When you see them in the email
program, you can’t tell the difference. But if you paste an email

message into a word processor, the difference becomes painfully
apparent—especially if you then attempt to adjust the margins.

To fix the page, delete the invisible carriage return at the end of each

line. (Veteran PC people sometimes use the word processor’s search-
and-replace function for this purpose, using the character code “^p” to
replace the paragraph marks.) Or, if you just need a quick look, reduce

the point size (or widen the margin) until the text no longer breaks
oddly.