MS Word

DevonThink doesn’t seem to play very well with MS Word (I’m using v.X). Of course “Services” doesn’t work, but the alternative, using “New with Clipboard” from the Dock menu, results in the text being pasted as an image (!). Maybe I’m missing some other way to do it.

StickyBrain works much better here, since its contextual menu option works fine with Word.

If you want only a selection from a Word document in your DT db, then instead of “New with Clipboard” you could use “New Rich Text…”, then paste the selection.

If you want the whole Word document, just drag it into the DT browser window (or, in DT Pro, into the Groups window). Or just drag it over the Dock icon. The document conversion to RTF isn’t perfect, but I’ve found it good enough with some some minor touch-ups.

I agree here. DT developers take note and learn from StickyBrain. The contextual menu options in SB are much better (and customizable) than the Services in DT. NoteBook’s contextual menus are also better than DT’s Services. Both StickyBrain and NoteBook allow you to customize the contextual menu so that grabbed info can be placed in specific places. Such a feature in DT is needed. Ease and options of getting info into DT is important.

Actually, I think AquaMinds NoteTaker has the best model of contextual menu options for grabbing text and placing it in any desired location. NT even allows appending selections to a previously made clipping.

Note that this is still a problem in ver. 1.9. “New with Clipboard” still pastes MSWord text as if it were HTML.

I don’t use MS Word, but do things change if you install AntiWordSerce?

devon-technologies.com/produ … eeware.php

Of course it does. Word puts clippings in more than one format on the clipboard and DT tries to get the best alternative. If there’s plain text and HTML, it should be HTML.

The problem with contextual menus is: They require some sort of hacking and are definitely non-standard. We try to stick to the “Apple way” of doing things. And Apple discourages hacks to the contextual menu and promotes the use of Services. Services are standard on Mac OS X, are easy to maintain, compatible and do not require hacking around in the system.

Best,

Eric.

That doesn’t make sense. Who uses Word to write HTML. No other app I’ve ever used pastes anything from a Word clipboard as HTML. At least give us a choice.

The problem with doing things the “right” way is that Word is a Carbon app that doesn’t use services. So we can’t use services, and we can’t use “New from Clipboard.” The alternative is to do it manually. Is it really your position that it should be as hard as possible to transfer from the wordprocessor that most of us are stuck with (because it is the “industry standard”)? Don’t you think your sales would improve if you played nice with Microsoft?

I disagree. First, the HTML that Word generates isn’t good HTML. But regardless of that, if I copy from a Word document, I want either plain text or RTF, not HTML and definitely not an image.

…Here, try this:

  1. In Word, type “foo bar baz”. Italicize the “bar”.
  2. Still in Word, Select All and then Copy.
  3. Switch to DT 1.9a.
  4. Create a new blank Rich Text document.
  5. Paste.
    → Text gets pasted correctly into Rich Text document, complete with italics. It’s still editable; exactly what I wanted and expected.
  6. Choose Content > New > With Clipboard
    → A new pict (!) document gets created, with an image of the text. The text isn’t editable.

Is there any situation in which a user would want that latter behavior? It seems to me that New With Clipboard should behave exactly the same way as creating a new RTF document and pasting into it.

Okay, yes, that makes sense. We’ll have a look at this issue.

Best,

Eric.

Copying or dragging text from MS Word to DT will create rich text documents in version 1.9.1. In addition, it will be possible to drag mails from Entourage too.