Copy and Paste Overview

When you copy text to the Microsoft Windows clipboard, certain applications copy more than just text to the system clipboard. For example, most Microsoft applications put the following formats on the clipboard for a copy operation:

Adobe FrameMaker puts FrameMaker Interchange Format (MIF) on the clipboard during a copy operation, as well as RTF markup and Unicode and ANSI text.

Using Arbortext Import/Export technology, Arbortext Editor can automatically map content on the clipboard to tagging appropriate for the document type of the document where the content is being pasted. Arbortext Editor generates a basic map template based on the following information:

The more formatting information that is provided in the source text, the better the paste operation can map to the document type elements. For example, if just ANSI text is available on the clipboard then all that could be determined is paragraph boundaries. However, if RTF is available on the clipboard then much more information is available to the paste operation. In this case, the paste operation can determine not only paragraphs, but also titles, images, links, tables, and so forth.

Note that some source types explicitly define document elements that can be mapped to markup without much ambiguity. In other cases, the source type implies parts of the document structure that might not reflect the desired result in the converted markup.

The type of document elements that are explicitly defined in a source type vary based on the type. The following table summarizes the document elements defined in the various source types.

Document Element	RTF	MIF	HTML	Text
Paragraphs	X	X	X	X
Titles			X
Divisions			X
Tables	X	X
Images	X		X
Links and cross references	X	X	X
Footnotes	X	X
Index terms	X	X
Inline emphasis (bold, italic, or underline)	X	X	X
Link targets (IDs or bookmarks)	X	X	X
Division titles (H1, H2, and so forth)			X
Divisions and Titles	X	X

Divisions and division titles must be inferred in most source types by the use of explicit style names. HTML markup, in contrast to word processor documents, contains actual hierarchical elements that can explicitly define divisions and their titles.

• The document type of the document currently being edited in Arbortext Editor where the text is being pasted

For the best results for a paste operation, details about the roles of various tags in the document type must be well defined in the associated .dcf file.

Support for copying and pasting from other applications has been added to the .dcf files for the following document types distributed with Arbortext Editor:

In most cases, copying and pasting works for both XML and SGML document types because Arbortext Editor has automatic features to handle XML-specific markup in a manner compatible with SGML markup.

While Arbortext Editor automatically creates Import MapTemplate files for these document types, you can use Arbortext Import to create custom maps for your site. For example, your site might use custom Microsoft Word style names site that need to be defined in the MapTemplate, or you might want to define additional inline elements for a paste operation besides the emphasis elements.

If you have an custom document type, you can also configure your document type to intelligently paste content from other applications into Arbortext Editor.