Unexpected (and unwanted) behaviour with copy / paste in hyperlink

[Dampsquid]

I select some plain text in a paragraph that happens to be a URL.  I highlight the text and turn it into a hyperlink.  I paste the copied text as the URL.  The pasted URL is incorrect as Publisher prepends the paragraph number the text was copied from on the front of the pasted text! Therefore the hyperlink doesn't work in the exported PDF.

Publisher 1.8.4. MacOS 10.15.7

[thomaso]

This was recently posted + logged...

 

[garrettm30]

In fixing this bug, I would like to suggest that Serif approach the fix in a way where the idea of copying with the bullet or numbering expanded as text is not the only possibility.

In fact, I think it is a mistake that copying such text results in paragraph styles getting expanded as text by default. As it is currently, there is no way to paste the text in other programs without the formatting being entered into a raw text paste, even in programs that offer "paste and match style."

A personal example: I am currently in a project where I must upload many hundreds of multiple choice type questions into a learning management platform online, line by line. For every single question and every single answer choice, I must first paste and then delete the numbering that got carried over into the raw text field. I was doing this from InDesign to the browser, but as I have been working from home lately (where I had chosen to uninstall InDesign from my home computer), I decided I could do it from Publisher via my IDML backup file. It does work, but at much extra work to clean up the text from every line. InDesign does not copy in this fashion, and so the job goes much faster if I work from InDesign, and I do not think it needs to be that way.

I believe that by default, text that is formatted with numbered text should be copied in a way where the numbering is still part of formatting, not converted to text. In other words, a rich text selection should still retain as much of its rich text nature as possible. In the current implementation, if I copy numbered text to another program that supports numbering as a paragraph attribute, then the pasted result is not as expected, since the numbering is already converted into raw text and no longer a formatting attribute. Take for instance this forum software, which supports numbered lists. Below I am starting a numbered list via the forum format bar, and then I will paste a numbered list from Publisher. Let's see the results:

1. Point one typed into the forum. The next points will be pasted from Publisher:

2. 1. One.

   2. Two.

   3. Three.

You see that the numbering that came over from Publisher was a hindrance rather than a help.

I do think there are times when one would want the numbering to be expanded into text, so the functionality itself is not bad, but I think this should be optional, either as a application preference, or as an alternate operation such as "copy with expanded numbering" (not sure how to word it).

If you implement this suggestion, you will have fixed this bug and also fixed other related issues where copying did not work in the way it was hoped.