Notes--Retain Formatting When Dragging Multiple to Word Processor

mbruffey

Hi! Is there a way to retain font formatting (bold, underlining, etc.) when dragging a selection of notes to Open Office Writer (Or MS Word)? I know I can do this from within a single note, but I really want to do it for multiple notes. Why? Well, it will let me, um, print (uh huh) them to 3x5 cards using my printer. Yeah, I am an old timer. I like the feel of sorting out ideas on real paper with real print . . . . thx, Mark

mbruffey

Discovered Workaround. Enter string "zzz" as last entry in every note. Create report from selected notes. Save as html. Open in Word. Search/Replace zzz with page break. Copy/Paste into Openoffice 3x5 Template. Print.

This is good. It would still be better if, someday, the team could enable multi-note drag and drop right into my 3x5 template. Gotta love the feel of those 3x5 cards!! Seriously, Zotero is a fantastic note taking resource; I just have to lay out piles of notes to arrange my ideas most efficiently.

Mark

dstillman

Not exactly sure what the issue you were having before—if anything, you should've been getting HTML code in dragged notes—but, regardless, rich-text copying should now work properly in the latest dev build.

mbruffey

Thanks, Dan, for taking time to read my post. Yes, the "problem" is that if I drag more than one note to OpenOffice Writer, I get tons of html (or RTF?) codes in the text--and I lose all my bold, italic, etc. Actually, the "problem" occurs if I "drag" only a single note as well. So, I suppose the problem is with dragging, period, rather than dragging multipIes. I can circumvent the problem by copying the contents of a single note and pasting that into the target document--bold looks bold, italics looks italicized, etc. I'm merely hoping for note drags to behave the same way as copying and pasting the contents of a single note works, I suppose. Thanks again. Mark

dstillman

I don't see how this could work for you for a single note, because that's had the same issue. Copying-and-pasting note content might work—as might selecting some text in a note and then dragging that, depending on your platform—so perhaps that what you meant by "within a single note"?

Anyway, dragging from the center pane is fixed, and the fix will be in the next release.

mbruffey

Note that I realized the error in my explanation of the problem and edited it by adding an underlined correction. I did this prior to realizing Dan had responded to the original version which lacked the underlining. Sorry Dan. Mark

ajlyon

This sounds like the drag bug that Frank had reported for OpenOffice under Linux.

Mbruffey-- are you using Linux? If so, this is likely an OpenOffice bug. If it's under Windows, can you upgrade to the latest version of OpenOffice and try again? In any case, it'd be helpful to post the versions of Windows (or Linux, or Mac OS) and Word / OpenOffice that you've tried. Also, try dragging into a simpler program, like WordPad or NotePad.

dstillman

The Linux bug persists, but dragged notes produced HTML markup on all platforms before this was fixed on the trunk a few days ago—I assume that's what Mark was referring to, since he mentioned MS Word as well.

mbruffey

Yeah, it's not a linux issue. Like Dan finally figured out from my cryptic jabbering, it's a universal problem when you drag a note into a word processor. Mark