Probably known for years but still new to me.

I tried to cut and paste a section of a Wikipedia article into a Word document and it came up with garbage. Tried again, same thing. Tried a small bit and it worked so tried more and more and it seems to hit a point where it only pastes garbage. Presumably a way to hinder people just copying whole articles. I can still copy large amounts of text but at only a paragraph or so at a time.

This is the sort of rubbish it does:

K i m J o n g - i l ' s o f f i c i a l b i o g r a p h y [ 1 ] s t a t e s t h a t h e w a s b o r n i n a s e c r e t m i l i t a r y c a m p o n B a e k d u M o u n t a i n

How did that happen? I cut and pasted the rubbish from the Word doc and it came out fine.

Actually I have just previewed that and it is now missing all spaces between words. I'm confused.

OK, to show the rubbish I have had to take a screenshot:



But I can cut and paste from that into anything else (new topic here, Apple Works document) and it shows up real words again. According to the Word document it is in a Times font and I've tried a load of other common fonts but still rubbish.

More research and it now appears to be a Word effect as I can cut and paste large extracts to everything except Word.

Any explanations.

rewrite:

The Dear Leader, wishing for only your happiness and contentment has taken steps to eliminate lies and slanders from these internets. You should thank The Dear Leader for his gift of your continuing good health.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/19/2008 07:26AM by RgrF.

I'm guessing that Word is getting confused about what encoding the text is. It thinks that it is in a one byte system, but it is a two byte encoding. It tries to display the second byte as a character. My first guess is that the encoding is actually UTF16 or something.

Edit: In other words, it is bug in Microsoft Word.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/19/2008 08:08AM by TheTominator.

Quote
TheTominator
Edit: In other words, it is bug in Microsoft Word.

a bug??? In microsoft word??? Surely not.

---

I tested this out with text from
[en.wikipedia.org]
pasted into Word for Mac v.X Service Release 1 running under Mac OS X 10.4.9 and didn't see the effect you describe. It appeared to behave properly.

What version of Microsoft Word are you using?
And since the handling of text encoding of the Mac OS X clipboard may have changed, what version of Mac OS X are you using?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/19/2008 08:58AM by TheTominator.

I'm running 10.5.4 on a 2.8 iMac. Word is version X.

What web browser were you copying from?

I used Safari 2.0.4 and didn't see an issue.

Firefox 3.

I will see if I can repeat it in Safari.