question about pasting html into Dreamweaver 4

[Petter Naess]

(Forgive me if this is an inappropriate forum for this question, but consulting librarians seemed a good idea when queries to more technical forums got me nowhere.... )

I suspect I'm overlooking something obvious (such as "obviously, this can't be done," ) but I can't figure out how to copy a url from an html document and paste it into the DW Design View pane without losing the formating!  Seems like a simple and everyday task, but DW just renders everything as plain, unformatted text when you paste it into the design view editor. (I've included below the fruitless exchange I had with well-intentioned responders at a webmaster forum, in case there's any confusion about what it is I'm looking for....) Thanks, Petter


(earlier - unproductive - traffic on this...)
response 1:

I think you are looking for shift + ctrl + v 

response 2:

It might seem a retrograde step to have a small Code View pane open as well as the Design Pane, but there are quite a lot of advantages. 

Firstly you can paste straight into there instead, and then click in the Design View to see the changes. 
Secondly, there are some things that are easier to do in the code window - moving Rows of a complicated Table layout (one with Colspans) is one that I find easier. 

My clarification:

Thank you both for your responses, but I think perhaps I haven't explained myself clearly enough... 

shift+ctrl+v is simply "paste as text" - it does that, and also removes line feeds that plain old ctrl+v would retain, but it does not preserve the format of the copied text. 

Pasting directly into Code View won't help either..if you want to paste into Code View, you must first find the source code and paste all of it - href tags and all - into Code View. 

Let me try to clarify with an example: I want to build a list of U.S. embassy websites in South Asia. I find a list of all U.S. embassy websites at http://usembassy.state.gov, and wish to paste just those in South Asia into my DW document, retaining the labels (e.g. Afghanistan: Kabul) but also the underlying urls. As far as I can tell, there's no way of doing this simply with DW. You can of course view source, copy the relevant source code into Code View and then edit out whatever you don't need, or you can add the links one at a time in Design View. DW will not even recognize labels that are identical with the underlying url (e.g. "visit our webpage at www.exmaple.com") - the tags always have to be entered manually in Code View, or via the Property Inspector tool in Design View. 

If you're trying to build a list of links harvested from many different sources - from other html lists, from urls embedded in text, and even from the address bar of your browser, this becomes very cumbersome, but perhaps there is no easier way of doing it in DW? 


response 3:

Do a 'save page' to your computer. Open the saved file, cut and paste into your new document. Also remember it is CSS styles that define the look so grab the style sheets used in the original page, you can see the location by looking at the code of the saved page. 

My response

Thanks, but as far as I can see, cutting and pasting from a saved file is no different than c&p from a file on the web; DW does not recognize the formatting in either case. And even if it did, this would be a very cumbersome way of building a list of links if you wanted to borrow selectively from a large assortment of pages. I suspect what I wish to do is simply not possible in Dreamweaver, but thanks everyone for all the suggestions! 


response 4:

I'm starting to understand... 
OK - well in Dreamweaver, in the Design Window, you can select a sentence containing a phrase that is a URL link, and you can paste it quite happily elsewhere in the Design window, and the sentence will still contain a phrase that has the URL link behind it. 
That means that it's not a Dreamweaver problem... 

You're right - if on my Mac I copy a sentence containing some links off (say) the BBC website, and paste them into Dreamweaver, I just get the text. The Mac clipboard states the content as "text". 
Interestingly, when I copy off the Dreamweaver Design window, the Mac clipboard states the content as text too - I must confess I was expecting "styled text". 

But I think that's the problem, or at least part of it... 
In the same way, I can create links inside AppleWorks, and cut and paste them to my heart's content within the document, but as soon as I try to export them, or inport others, I get the same problem. 

The immediate workaround would seem to be to save the source webpage to disc, and open it in Dreamweaver, where I feel sure you could drag and drop from the source file to your target file. 











*********************************************************************
Due to deletion of content types excluded from this list by policy,
this multipart message was reduced to a single part, and from there
to a plain text message.
*********************************************************************