Win XP Copy Paste problem

13 December 2003 · 2 comments

I look after a website which runs on a Microsoft server. Since it was “upgraded” I’m forced to use Windows to interact with it in order to edit content. I’m using Virtual PC 6 and Windows XP Pro. I regularly log and check submitted content. I generally have to copy the content, edit it in [...]

 

I look after a website which runs on a Microsoft server. Since it was “upgraded” I’m forced to use Windows to interact with it in order to edit content. I’m using Virtual PC 6 and Windows XP Pro. I regularly log and check submitted content. I generally have to copy the content, edit it in Tex-Edit Plus (TE+) and then paste it back in.

Recently I struck a strange snag and have only just had time to track it down. When I attempt to paste into TE+ an error message appears suggesting an Applescript problem. When I dismiss that I find the text has been pasted in but doesn’t wrap to the window until I do something like click in front of the text and press Return.

Last night I did a whole lot of testing and found this:

  1. copy and paste from Mac to Mac: no problem.
  2. copy and paste from Virtual PC Windows 98 to Mac: no problem.
  3. copy and paste from Virtual PC Windows XP Pro to Mac in TextEdit or BBEdit Lite: no problem.
  4. copy and paste from Virtual PC Windows XP Pro to Mac in TE+: the problem occurs.

Here’s the interesting thing: Show invisibles in BBEdit Lite displays a red upside-down question mark between the final character and the paragraph indicator. If I paste that text into the Address Bar in Safari it displays as %00.

The extra character appears whether I copy text from the middle of a para or text which includes a para marker.

If I take the text copied from WinXP and paste into TE+, dismiss the error message and then immediately choose Tools — CleanUp — Strip Control Characters (as per the Help file) then voila the text wraps correctly and the weird character is gone (tested by pasting that resulting text into BBedit Lite).

Other tests show:

Paste into these apps is fine: Eudora, Fishpad, MacJournal, CopyWrite, Caboodle, AppleWorks 6, Word vX, Nisus Writer Express, Circus Ponies Notebook, SubEthaEdit, Tofu, VooDooPad. (I’ve been testing a bunch of apps lately.)

Paste into Mellel: text doesn’t display at all but stats window shows 236 characters in 48 words. Some fiddling shows me the text is some weird size — about 4 pixels / points tall. Weird.

I’ve filed a bug report and Tom, the author of the software, says:

The attached file archive, does indeed have a null (ASCII 0) character at the end of one of the paragraphs.

This null should be handled correctly by WASTE, but there may indeed be some sort of bug of which I am not aware. Unicode characters should transfer seamlessly into Tex-Edit.

There may be a glitch in the “convert windows clipboard to Mac clipboard” VPC routine that emits unusual character combinations or an unusual data “flavor” (tag that tells the receiving application the data type being pasted).

Since VPC won’t run on my system, I may have trouble working around this, but I will keep my eyes open.

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Ger 25 December 2008 at 00:36 31

Appearently it’s a combination thingy…
I am on PC-XP with latest version of Safari and i have the same problem with copy-pasting within the browser. But not with FireFox, Internet Explorer, Chrome or Opera…

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Miraz Jordan 25 December 2008 at 09:39 26

Thanks, Ger.

This is such an old post …

I think in the end I installed a Windows text editor (EditPlus) and used BBEdit on the Mac. I had the same document open in both at the same time — both can auto-update if a document is edited by another application while it’s open in the text editor.

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