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Written by abadidea on 2025-01-28 at 11:08

Turns out that if you copy text from OneNote and paste it into something that can accept either text or images, it decides you must want a bitmap rendering of your text. I pasted the text into this posting box and got the image, then pasted it again into the image's alt text and got text. Incredible. 0/10 ux, principle of least astonishment maximally violated

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Descendants

Written by abadidea on 2025-01-28 at 11:11

is this why normies keep sending me near-useless screenshots of their documents???

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Written by Talen Lee on 2025-01-28 at 11:08

@0xabad1dea Excel does this too!

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Written by irina 🐇🌷 on 2025-01-28 at 11:15

@Talen_Lee with excel though, it kicks butt. doesn't seem to do it in the webapp though?

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Written by Advanced Persistent Teapot on 2025-01-28 at 11:16

@0xabad1dea given the number of times in my career I've asked someone to attach an email and they've printed it, scanned in a print, and attached the scan... I'm going to have to say sorry, no, this does not explain it

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Written by Cursv on 2025-01-28 at 11:47

@http_error_418 @0xabad1dea One reason I can think of is to remove metadata or steganography, which are known to be abused for tracking etc.

But, of course, that's probably not thr case here.

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Written by Nils Ballmann on 2025-01-28 at 15:37

@0xabad1dea at least partly, because this normalizes pasting screenshots. :blobcatgrimacing:

Hence, I have adapted this handy keyboard shortcut:

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Written by Rainer Müller on 2025-01-28 at 18:39

@nils_ballmann @0xabad1dea There is a need for a page like https://nohello.net but for "no screenshots". I also have team members who prefer to send me a screenshot instead of copy & pasting their code in chat.

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Written by jmj on 2025-01-29 at 08:01

@raimue @nils_ballmann @0xabad1dea I blame one part JavaScript and one part Apple. JavaScript broke the text nature of the web such what you saw on the screen wasn’t text document anymore. Then Apple replaced everyone’s computer something that didn’t support copy/paste so everyone learned to take screenshots.

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Written by abadidea on 2025-01-29 at 08:05

@Jmj @raimue @nils_ballmann as a heavy Apple user, I am surprised to learn I haven’t been using copy/paste a hundred times a day the last twenty years

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Written by jmj on 2025-01-29 at 15:02

@0xabad1dea @raimue @nils_ballmann https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/20/apple-engineer-first-iphone-copy-and-paste/

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Written by abadidea on 2025-01-29 at 15:10

@Jmj @raimue @nils_ballmann I knew one (1) single person who had a first-model iPhone, I don't think the fact that there was a window from 2007-2008 where some tiny fraction of humanity had a phone that was slightly more advanced than most other phones but couldn't copy-paste and otherwise clearly wasn't a general personal computing device somehow redefined humanity's relationship to the existence of copy-paste

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Written by Nils Ballmann on 2025-01-29 at 15:32

@0xabad1dea @Jmj @raimue I agree.

To to make you all feel old: IIRC my dad was doing the notepad dance on Windows since ~2005.

But that may be – as a Linux user – my anti-Window-bias speaking...

I just wonder how and why it got introduced in that way also on Linux. Because I don't remember the starting point of that.

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Written by Gary Parker on 2025-01-28 at 11:12

@0xabad1dea OneNote is absolutely bloody awful for using with any other application, even other MS apps. It's just too bloody clever for it's own good and mangles everything you put into it.

They threw all the functionality they could think of at it, with no thought for how that would work with other M365 apps, let alone non-MS apps

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Written by Charlotte 🦝 :therian: on 2025-01-28 at 11:18

@0xabad1dea i have seen this with libreoffice calc, if you paste it into telegram it pastes an image but if you cancel out of that it will give you a TSV

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Written by Charlotte 🦝 :therian: on 2025-01-28 at 11:23

@0xabad1dea i think the way this works is that clipboards can actually have several different content types in it at the same time, and libreoffice copies cells in a ton of different formats

some applications let you choose which content type you want to paste as (most notably the typical paste/paste without formatting confusion) but generally it seems to be incredibly undiscoverable

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Written by Charlotte 🦝 :therian: on 2025-01-28 at 11:24

@0xabad1dea oh yeah just checked it with discord

it will pick the first supported content type which is image/png

if you however cannot paste image/png there it will go all the way down to presumably text/plain

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Written by Charlotte 🦝 :therian: on 2025-01-28 at 11:26

@0xabad1dea anyways in the most undiscoverable way possible, if you just want to paste the text without formatting ctrl+shift+v will do it

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Written by Kagan MacTane on 2025-01-28 at 15:21

@charlotte @0xabad1dea

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Written by Adam ♿ on 2025-01-28 at 11:41

@0xabad1dea https://evercoder.github.io/clipboard-inspector/ shows the formats really well, at least in Firefox.

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Written by Thomas Neubauer on 2025-01-28 at 11:48

@0xabad1dea I hate this so much. After accidentally uploading pictures to JIRA a few times, i remember now to use the "Win + Shift + V" shortcut. But this makes it unnecessary annoying.

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Written by Fritz Adalis on 2025-01-28 at 12:28

@0xabad1dea @catsalad

The last usable version of Onenote was 2016. The rest of Office peaked in 2013.

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Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-28 at 12:28

@0xabad1dea The annoying thing is, I can see how this happens:

When you copy, an app chooses a set of things that it can provide and sends a copy of the data to the clipboard in each of these formats. When you paste, the target app just sees a list of available types and has to choose one. It can't differentiate between these two cases:

Normally, an app will provide plain text and rich text, so that you can paste and lose style into things that can't handle rich text (note: the lack of a decent standard rich text view on Windows is part of the reason this tends to be terrible on Windows: macOS's NSTextView can serialise things in such a way that anything else that uses them can deserialise and most things on macOS use this because it's secretly a rich DTP system masquerading as a text field).

If OneNote provides text and image, because it uses some internal weird hybrid HTMLish format for rich text that it can't usefully export, then you'd see image and text as the types and most things would choose image.

Interestingly, on macOS it appears that OneNote copies only plain text, not rich text or an image.

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Written by abadidea on 2025-01-28 at 12:30

@david_chisnall for the record I am on osx, but pasting into web apps in Chrome, which may be relevant.

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Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-28 at 12:45

@0xabad1dea Huh.

This made me curious so I dug out some sample code I wrote ages ago for a Cocoa book to see what types are actually present. It looks like it provides a lot:

com.microsoft.OneNote-2016-Internal

public.html

Apple HTML pasteboard type

public.png

Apple PNG pasteboard type

public.utf16-plain-text

CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x75747874

public.utf8-plain-text

NSStringPboardType

com.apple.webarchive

Apple Web Archive pasteboard type

public.rtf

NeXT Rich Text Format v1.0 pasteboard type

public.utf16-external-plain-text

CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x75743136

com.microsoft.ole.source.34152.0x6000012d30c0

com.microsoft.DataObject

com.microsoft.appbundleid

public.tiff

NeXT TIFF v4.0 pasteboard type

I think the sender provides them in order of preference, so the top one is for pasting from OneNote to OneNote (which is always OneNose in my head) and probably just contains the location in memory of the thing. But then the next two are HTML, then PNG. My guess is that the web apps, for some reason, don't support pasting HTML? The PNG is the next in order, with UTF-16 and UTF-8 text after that.

This order does seem kind-of sensible. If it's mostly HTML internally (it is an Electron app, I believe, or at least some kind of embedded WebView app), that's the highest priority, then the PNG will have higher visual fidelity than plain text and then plain text as the fallback.

But I don't know why a Chrome thing wouldn't choose to paste HTML, given the choice.

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Written by John Philip Bell on 2025-01-28 at 13:50

@david_chisnall @0xabad1dea

Yeah, I was going to point out the selected 'type' of the data (of the source app's 1..n offered flavors) is up to the receiving application, I've been a Windows developer since the 3.1 days... Unless something changed or I've forgotten, I don't even think the source application knows what applications are consuming clipboard data. 🤔 (I think DDE did, but... the mind plays tricks after all these years)

(nice explanation/write-up @david_chisnall)

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Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-28 at 13:59

@john_philip_bell @0xabad1dea This is one of the mistakes the Wayland folks made (I think it might be fixed in later versions?): they made drag and drop behave like copy and paste. With the latter, there's a potentially long time between the copy and the paste and the source can go away in the middle. This removes the opportunity for content negotiation and means copy can be a fairly high-latency operation because you need to provide all possible useful encodings.

With drag and drop, you want the drag to start immediately, but then at drop time you have a live channel between sender and receiver, so can do content negotiation and encode only the desired format. Latency at drop time is much more acceptable to users than latency at drag time.

DDE was more exciting because it created a live channel between sender and receiver and so both were able to edit the same underlying object. Few things used it well.

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Written by Tailsteak on 2025-01-28 at 13:00

@0xabad1dea I'm sure this isn't the case, but if Microsoft was required to technically do what you asked, but had some sort of vested interest in preventing actual ease of communication between individuals, what would be different?

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Written by abadidea on 2025-01-28 at 13:07

@tailsteak well they could change the font to wingdings, for starters

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Written by WtfPdf on 2025-01-28 at 13:28

@0xabad1dea

Paging #adobe, can I get #adobe on the line for this feature for PDFs?

OMG 🤯🤯🤯

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Written by Michael Stanclift on 2025-01-28 at 13:37

@0xabad1dea @briankrebs Excel will do this too. In some cases I do find it useful.

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Written by McCrankyface on 2025-01-28 at 13:38

@0xabad1dea I have gotten into the habit of pasting text into a text editor and copying it back out before pasting it where I want it for much the same reason.

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Written by Marley on 2025-01-28 at 16:50

@0xabad1dea

That's wild!

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Written by foxyoreos (🔞) on 2025-01-29 at 00:38

@0xabad1dea I.. but.. wha..

til I don't actually have as much understanding of how copy/paste works as I thought - I would have sworn it was up to the receiving program how to handle the copied data.

Or does OneNote just paste an extra image inside of its data format whenever you copy any text? Is this hekin standardized somehow? O_o

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Written by foxyoreos (🔞) on 2025-01-29 at 00:40

@0xabad1dea I know if I paste formatted text into a raw text editor, the formatting gets stripped. I always just assumed it was the receiving program doing that, I didn't think the source program could do something like send simultaneous data formats.

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Written by abadidea on 2025-01-29 at 06:01

@foxyoreos it apparently pre-loads the image as one option yes, but the receiving apps take the image because they assume the text option is just, like, the image’s file name as a fallback, because who Does This

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Written by Karsten Johansson on 2025-01-29 at 05:17

@0xabad1dea That's bizarre, and a good reason to not use OneNote.

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Written by nicksname he/him on 2025-01-31 at 08:20

@0xabad1dea

I hope the text is copied formatted if possible. /s

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