Paste

TypeMetal fixes, cleans, and streamlines incoming HTML as it pastes — scrubbing it to give you lean, semantic-styling-ready content, and adapting it if necessary to yield correctly structured HTML where it’s pasted. This makes it a great tool for collecting and modernizing clippings to quote in your own HTML documents.

TypeMetal also accepts plain text from any source. Using TypeMetal’s quick and easy interfaces for wrapping selected text runs in elements and snippets and applying attributes to those elements, you can quickly mark pasted text up however you like.

This same functionality applies to content you drag and drop into your documents.

Basic Pasting

To paste content in TypeMetal, as in other apps, you can:

• Press Command+V, or
• Choose Edit → Paste from the menus

When you use this default Paste command, TypeMetal decides how to interpret the pasteboard’s contents automatically.

• If the pasteboard contains HTML (WebArchive) content, as might have been copied from a Web browser window or a TypeMetal document window, TypeMetal pastes that.
• If the pasteboard contains a URL, TypeMetal pastes that as a new hyperlink (<a> element). If the URL has an accompanying title, it becomes the value of the <a> element’s “title” attribute.
• If the pasteboard contains plain text, TypeMetal parses it as possible HTML, and pastes the result.

Pasting as Plain Text

If you want to paste some HTML source code into your document as ordinary text:

• Press Command+Shift+Option+V, or
• Choose Edit → Paste as Plain Text from the menus

If you’re presenting a multi-line block of HTML source code in your document, you may next want to wrap it in a <code> element within a <pre> (pre-formatted text) element. Wrap in the <pre> first, which leaves the contents of the <pre> element selected. Then wrap in a <code> element.

Cleanup During and After Pasting

The Web is chock full of HTML markup you might not want in your own documents. Some of it contains serious structural errors, such as unclosed or mismatched tags. Some is merely dated, using elements from bygone eras such as HTML 3, or overburdened with explicit styling that works against the CSS-based semantic styling we strive for today.

When you paste or drop outside HTML into a document, TypeMetal cleans it up on its way in. Among other things, it:

• fixes structural errors
• removes explicit “style” attributes from elements
• removes WebKit-added “class” names, such as “Apple-converted-space”, “Apple-interchange-newline”, and “Apple-style-span”

These automatic fixes go a long way toward yielding markup you’ll want to work with.

Once you’ve pasted some content into an HTML file, you may want to inspect it and make additional changes to suit the styling conventions you’re using in your document. TypeMetal’s “Show Block Structure” mode, its Source Loupe, and the path bar’s navigation menus can help you examine the HTML you’ve just pasted. The path bar’s navigation menus are especially useful for finding, selecting, and deleting invisible elements such as explicit line breaks (<br> and <wbr>).

If you like, you can also remove all HTML markup from a run of content by choosing Structure → Remove All Elements from Selection. Sometimes it is faster to start over from scratch with plain text, than to modify existing markup to suit your wishes.