[Solved] Copy + Paste does not work

[superiority]

I tried to copy the text on this page into a Writer document (OOo 2.3.1 on Vista) so that I could read it at my leisure when not connected to the internet. I found that a random portion of the text from the middle was cut out when I tried to paste it; in Writer, a sentence in the middle of chapter 5 was cut short, followed by the 'Back Matter' heading that indicated appendices. I have tried this multiple times, and the beginning of the removed section appears to be a somewhat random position in chapters 4-6, while the end is always the very last chapter, so that all appendices are always included. I am very confused here.

If this is not clear, consider this:

Code: Select all

Original Document
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Appendix A
Appendix B

I copy all this text and paste it into Writer, and the result is this:

Code: Select all

Writer Document
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Cha
Appendix A
Appendix B

Copy+Pasting into other applications works without any issues. Could someone help me?
EDIT: I have not been able to replicate this with other large webpages, yet it works without fail on the one linked above.

[floris v]

Correct. That's because that internet article is built up of paragraphs with over 64 K characters a piece and OOo cant handle paragraphs longer than 64 K. It just cuts them down to size. The issue has been filed and they're working on it.

<starts rant>Honestly, it's much better to just save the page (File -> Save as in your browser) because even if the paragraphs aren't too big, OOo has a nasty habit of not saving the graphics from a paste - it will try to get them from the internet, even when you are off line. You can view saved files on your hard disk in a browser, so it looks vastly better than in OOo, for which it wasn't designed, anyway.<end rant>

If this solves your problem, please edit the first post of this thread (Edit button) and add [Solved] to the subject line.

[superiority]

That seems to be the problem, and also explains why it didn't work for all webpages - the one in question uses <br> tags to separate paragraphs while others I tried used <p>. Just a note: I was only copying the text anyway, and was reformatting it so as to be easier for me to read.

[huw]

Paragraph cannot be longer than 65534 characters - issue 17171 (aka the 64K paragraph bug), if anyone wants to register and vote for it to be fixed.

[acknak]

I would never have believed there was a legitimate need for a paragraph longer than 64k if I hadn't seen it. Even here, the need is only because the source is badly formatted.

I'm not sure that relaxing the size limit, in this case preserving the bad formatting, is the best answer, but surely silently truncating parts of the text is the worst possible approach. Well, ok, crashing would be worse.

At any rate, using Edit > Paste Special > "Unformatted text" seems to work for me. The result still has all the text, with reasonable paragraph boundaries.

Yet another reason unformatted text should be the default paste format.

[huw]

I would never have believed there was a legitimate need for a paragraph longer than 64k if I hadn't seen it. Even here, the need is only because the source is badly formatted.

I read somewhere, possibly in the comments on the issue, that a branch of the legal profession are the main users of 64K+ paragraphs - apparently there are certain documents that need to be written as one paragraph for them to be acceptable in law.

Hmmm... search the comments on the issue for acta. Although I'm not sure that's what I read, it is along the same lines.

[floris v]

I'm not sure that relaxing the size limit, in this case preserving the bad formatting, is the best answer, but surely silently truncating parts of the text is the worst possible approach. Well, ok, crashing would be worse.

I disagree. Crashing would be better - it would show you that the program has a problem with that file. If it just truncates the text and you aren't aware of it and don't make checks, you just lose part of your text. If the program crashes, the developers will get flamed to the point where they really do something about it soon enough.

The legal gang: I strongly feel that they only demand single paragraphs of that size - and probably one sentence too - because they want to make their texts unreadable for non-professionals. I remember I received a letter on those lines one - in reply to a complaint I had filed - it was four pages and one sentence. Somewhere on page 2 I got lost. And then I can still read long sentences. No - if it was for that kind of thing only , I'd much rather have a total stop on paragraphs longer than 3000 characters.