Paste without waste


Tip
You're typing along in WordPad (Windows 95) or Windows Write (Windows 3.x) and decide you need a special character from the Wingdings font -- maybe a fancy bullet or a tiny icon. You launch Windows Character Map, select Wingdings from the Font list, double-click the character you want, click Copy, switch back to your application, and paste.
Oops! That's not what you selected! Well, it is -- but it's the wrong font and the wrong size.
The problem is that the Wingdings font doesn't export its format correctly from Character Map. With Write the problem gets worse: it's difficult to paste any formatting information from other applications into Write. For example, if you're pasting 24-point BlippoBlack from Microsoft Word into a Write document formatted with 12-point Arial, chances are you'll get 12-point Arial, just like the rest of your document. Sometimes that's okay. Sometimes it's not.
What to do? You could select each item you paste and manually reapply the formatting and font you need. This is easy enough for WordPad users -- just select a font from the Format Bar. And if you're not dealing with Wingdings, you can control the format of pasted text by choosing Edit--Paste Special. When you want to be sure the imported text retains its original size and typeface, select Formatted Text (RTF) in the Paste Special dialogue box and click OK. When you want the pasted text to adopt the formatting of its new context, select Unformatted Text and click OK.
Write users can manually reformat text by choosing Character--Fonts, but this gets painfully slow if you're pasting a lot of special characters. Here's a solution: at the end of your document, create one line in each font you'll want for imported text. Then when you need, say, a Wingdings character, just jump to the end of your document and paste the character in the Wingdings line. Select it and choose Edit--Cut (or press <Ctrl>-X). Then move to where you want the character and paste it again -- and enjoy a real change of paste.
- Scott Dunn

Category: Word processing
Issue: Nov 1996
Pages: 168

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