Pages: how to retain formatting when pasting into Pages?

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I've been trying to find a solution to my problem for days, yet I can't. Everyone seems to have the opposite problem: people copy websites or emails into Pages and want the source formatting to disappear, while it is there.

I want to keep the formatting (the font, it's size, colour, any bold or italicised words, links and, most importantly, images) but it all disappears no matter what I do. No, I don't use the "Paste and match style" option, just plain pasting. And still, my text is reduced to Helvetica size 11, which is the default formatting in Pages for me. This is so annoying! I just can't work. MS Office on Windows has this useful little box that appear whenever you paste something into Word, asking you whether you want to save the original formatting, merge it or retain the text only. Pages does the last thing, even though I don't want it to.

So, the ultimate question is: how to make Pages maintain the formatting of the text pasted?
 

Cory Cooper

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Hello and welcome.

-Which version of Mac OS X?
-Which version of Pages are you using?
-Can you give an example website that you are trying to copy/paste from?

It should retain some of, if not all, of the formatting that you copied it from. However, if you copy text and graphics from a website that is using things like CSS and stylesheets, it may lost the font, but it should retain the sizing.

C
 
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Hello and thank you for quick response.

I'm using OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 and Pages 5.5.3 (2152).
Website – any. I tried copying and pasting this thread for instance, the two posts that are poster already, and it ends up in plain text, Helvetica 11.

When I copy e-mails (I use Mail) into Pages, the formatting is maintained. And, I just thought – maybe this is important: for my browser I use Chrome, which is not a native Mac app, as opposed to Safari. Maybe this is the key?

Let's see.

Ok, now this is fascinating. A ridiculous revelation after days of looking for a solution. I copy a website from Chrome to Pages and it ends up as plain text. I copy the same website from Safari into Pages and the entire formatting is maintained, just as I want it to be.

Maybe copying works only between Mac applications? I mean the original Mac ones? And since Chrome isn't really one of them, it's just a product adapted for OS X... maybe it just won't work? Like the underlying coding of fonts is different or something like this?
 

Cory Cooper

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Thanks for the additional information.

Yes, it must have something to do with the way that Chrome handles text/fonts. Chrome is a native Mac app...it is written from the ground up for all platforms. It's just not an Apple app.

At least you found a workable solution for now.

C
 

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