Need help pasting text without formatting

[Big Frank]

I have a series of marketing leaflets I have to translate. I have a column of French text, formatted. I have, next to that, a copy of that column. On the pasteboard I have my translated English text, ready to paste over the relevant headlines, subheads and body of the second column. This column of text has the format " (No Style) " but of course this isn't true. Its style is in fact Arial 10pt black and, when I copy and paste this text over the corresponding sections of the second French column, the "No Style" replaced the formatted French text.

So, to my question: how do you copy and paste text within Xara without also pasting the format of that text?

This is killing me because in order to achieve this I have to copy my text not from the column of English text on the Pasteboard but from a text file open in TextPad which truly carries over no font formatting when copied and pasted into Xara. I really hope there is a shortcut key (like Ctrl+S for moving objects freehand even if Snap to Objects is selected) that I have never realised was there.

[Sadler]

Paste the text into another program first then paste it back into Xara.

Pasting from another application gives the option to paste text only.

Unfortunately, pasting text already pasted or pasting text copied from somewhere else in Xara doesn't give this option.

[Big Frank]

What you have suggested is what I'm already doing. But just think about that for a moment and realise how stupid and annoying that is for workflow. It is impossible, for example, to copy a headline that is a screaming large 107pt and then paste it into your 10pt body text without it throwing everything out of tilt. You then have to select that text that you pasted, which By The Way you cannot select by double-clicking and moving the cursor forwards like I can in just about every other Windows program ever written. I mean, even LibreOffice allows you to copy and paste text, without pasting the formatting. I mean, for the love of god, they are selling this as a DTP application *facepalm*

Sorry for the rant. But it's a justified rant. Xara is exceptional in so many ways. Yet in so many small, niggling ways, it lacks the polish that would make it a giant killer. IMHO anyway.

[Gamerprinter]

If you have lots of varying fonts and font sizes for headlines, subheads, and standard paragraph text, I can see this as problematic. Published documents I create sometimes have varying headlines and subheads, as well, but not overly so, such that a single full headline might only exist once every 2 pages of content. So when I cut text from a Word document, I only select the paragraph text, and not all the text, so I won't accidentally paste a mess of varying sizes and types in my Xara document. I select only one type/scale of font at a time, often hand-typing the headlines and subheads which require large font scale and different fonts than the body text. So requiring me to be more selective of the text I copy from one document to another. It works for me, as this is primarily how I do page layout in Xara.

[Acorn]

Also with MS Word, the formatting is in the paragraph break so after selecting a paragraph I use use Shift+Left Arrow to avoid it and I get plain text.

Acorn

[Big Frank]

So when I cut text from a Word document, I only select the paragraph text, and not all the text, so I won't accidentally paste a mess of varying sizes and types in my Xara document.

I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I have no problem copying and pasting text from some random app into Xara. My issue is copying and pasting text from a Xara doc into a Xara doc. But it's clear there isn't a solution that doesn't involve exporting it into a text editor and then importing it back into Xara. Ridiculous.

[Gamerprinter]

Well sometimes I copy text from another source to import to Xara intended for 2 column format, but sometimes cut too much text, so that the copy extends past the bottom of the column. Once placed I cut the excess copy to place in the next column on the same page. Essentially moving the copy to the clipboard then pasting into the same document at a different location. When I do this I don't seem to encounter the problem you're having - it copies and pastes just fine. I've never tried to move copy from one Xara document to another different Xara document, but don't imagine it would be any different then copying text to itself. I don't know how much varying text you have or to what degree the difference in font scale, so I'm not sure what kind of issues you're having. If there were font scale issues, I'd do what I suggested in my previous post, by selecting only the same size font in the copied region of the text copy - I avoid copying varying text sizes in the same selection of copy/paste of content.

[Acorn]

I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I have no problem copying and pasting text from some random app into Xara. My issue is copying and pasting text from a Xara doc into a Xara doc. But it's clear there isn't a solution that doesn't involve exporting it into a text editor and then importing it back into Xara. Ridiculous.

And the point I was making is you don't copy over the end of the paragraph in the destination as you lose the style.

It struck me as obvious that if you are copying a number of (No style) paragraphs into a text block that had other styles then they will be overwritten.
(No style) has to have some font to be able to display something.

Xara is more clever than MS Word, which only asks if you want to apply destination or source styling.
Xara retains source styling but modifies the Style information.
To then achieve destination styling, you click on the Style drop down and click the grey-shaded style to revert to the destination format.
Xara also allows paragraph styling to be mixed in a line and across lines; MS Word only works on paragraphs.

Acorn

[qmr]

There is an excellent free utility that runs in the background all the time to achieve this, I've been using since win98 to quickly remove formatting while building web pages and everywhere else when pasting text from Word etc.. and the chap updates it so it'll work on win v8 too.

http://stevemiller.net/puretext/

Just copy the text and set it to use hotkey paste similar to Ctrl/V but in this case Windows/V
Give it a go, see if it does the job for you.

Q

oops just read above post so maybe its irrelevant, but useful for somebody else

[Acorn]

Q, I wouldn't worry, it is a clever little utility.
Acorn