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It might make more sense as a clipboard filter. If you're an English speaker that doesn't often handle languages which gain from zero width characters you coul
by Someone1234 9y ago
It might make more sense as a clipboard filter.
If you're an English speaker that doesn't often handle languages which gain from zero width characters you could just have a listener scan your clipboard for zero-width characters, silently strip them, and then re-populate the clipboard.
Although I've been thinking about building a clipboard filter for Windows a lot lately, I'm getting tired of copying text to the address bar or notepad to strip text formatting information.
- tomerico 9y agoCtrl+shift+v pastes without formatting
- enzanki_ars 9y agoNot on all apps though. Office apps do not respect that shortcut convention and require clicking on the "Paste Without Formatting" button.
- MereInterest 9y agoIn Office, you can hit Ctrl after pasting, then "t" to select paste without formatting, which is nicer than switching from keyboard to mouse. The obnoxious thing is that, if the source text did not actually have formatting, then there is no menu that opens by Ctrl, and "t" is instead inserted verbatim. Wrecks havoc with my muscle memory, that I need to keep track of where I copied text from when pasting.
- enzanki_ars 9y agoAs much as that would be a helpful shortcut to remember, I know I won't. As a result, I just changed the default paste settings in Office.
- irrational 9y agoThat just removes formatting. zero-width characters are not formatting so they wouldn't be removed. They are as real as the letter A - you wouldn't want ctrl+shift+v to remove all A's from your text, would you?
- Alex3917 9y agoZero width characters can also be used to force long strings of text to wrap correctly, so this may break the layout of sites that allow things like URLs in UGC text.
- Someone1234 9y agoWhy would a website flow through a user's clipboard?
- teolandon 9y agothey're talking about OP's extension that modifies how the website is presented. Not the clipboard idea.
- EamonnMR 9y agoIn my experience, adding a zero width character into something that someone might copy/paste is generally a bad idea because it'll lead to some very irritated users having to manually remove them from copied data.
- fouc 9y agoThe extension itself could just strip the characters during the copy action only perhaps
- roel_v 9y agoThere is the puretext utility that strips formatting. Can't remember if it's open source so that you could add stripping zw chars.