Turns out that if you copy text from OneNote and paste it into something that can accept either text or images, it decides you must want a bitmap rendering of your text. I pasted the text into this posting box and got the image, then pasted it again into the image's alt text and got text. Incredible. 0/10 ux, principle of least astonishment maximally violated

is this why normies keep sending me near-useless screenshots of their documents???

@0xabad1dea i have seen this with libreoffice calc, if you paste it into telegram it pastes an image but if you cancel out of that it will give you a TSV

@charlotte @0xabad1dea there's one image editor I used on Mac where if I try to copy out of it and paste into Telegram, it'll try to send a PDF

so I have to clean the result by pasting it into a different image editor and then re-copying it

I call this "clipboard laundering”

@0xabad1dea i think the way this works is that clipboards can actually have several different content types in it at the same time, and libreoffice copies cells in a ton of different formats

some applications let you choose which content type you want to paste as (most notably the typical paste/paste without formatting confusion) but generally it seems to be incredibly undiscoverable

@0xabad1dea oh yeah just checked it with discord

it will pick the first supported content type which is image/png

if you however cannot paste image/png there it will go all the way down to presumably text/plain

@0xabad1dea anyways in the most undiscoverable way possible, if you just want to paste the text without formatting ctrl+shift+v will do it

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange I don't think OneNote is that popular a thing... ​​

@Orca apparently it's not just OneNote but all the big Microsoft rich-text apps these days (I don't usually use them)

@0xabad1dea @catsalad
The last usable version of Onenote was 2016. The rest of Office peaked in 2013.

@0xabad1dea The annoying thing is, I can see how this happens:

When you copy, an app chooses a set of things that it can provide and sends a copy of the data to the clipboard in each of these formats. When you paste, the target app just sees a list of available types and has to choose one. It can't differentiate between these two cases:

• Here is some rich text that I have rendered as a picture for including in image editors.
• Here is an image with some alt text for things that can't handle images.

Normally, an app will provide plain text and rich text, so that you can paste and lose style into things that can't handle rich text (note: the lack of a decent standard rich text view on Windows is part of the reason this tends to be terrible on Windows: macOS's NSTextView can serialise things in such a way that anything else that uses them can deserialise and most things on macOS use this because it's secretly a rich DTP system masquerading as a text field).

If OneNote provides text and image, because it uses some internal weird hybrid HTMLish format for rich text that it can't usefully export, then you'd see image and text as the types and most things would choose image.

Interestingly, on macOS it appears that OneNote copies only plain text, not rich text or an image.

@david_chisnall for the record I am on osx, but pasting into web apps in Chrome, which may be relevant.

@0xabad1dea Huh.

This made me curious so I dug out some sample code I wrote ages ago for a Cocoa book to see what types are actually present. It looks like it provides a lot:

com.microsoft.OneNote-2016-Internal
public.html
Apple HTML pasteboard type
public.png
Apple PNG pasteboard type
public.utf16-plain-text
CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x75747874
public.utf8-plain-text
NSStringPboardType
com.apple.webarchive
Apple Web Archive pasteboard type
public.rtf
NeXT Rich Text Format v1.0 pasteboard type
public.utf16-external-plain-text
CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x75743136
com.microsoft.ole.source.34152.0x6000012d30c0
com.microsoft.DataObject
com.microsoft.appbundleid
public.tiff
NeXT TIFF v4.0 pasteboard type

I think the sender provides them in order of preference, so the top one is for pasting from OneNote to OneNote (which is always OneNose in my head) and probably just contains the location in memory of the thing. But then the next two are HTML, then PNG. My guess is that the web apps, for some reason, don't support pasting HTML? The PNG is the next in order, with UTF-16 and UTF-8 text after that.

This order does seem kind-of sensible. If it's mostly HTML internally (it is an Electron app, I believe, or at least some kind of embedded WebView app), that's the highest priority, then the PNG will have higher visual fidelity than plain text and then plain text as the fallback.

But I don't know why a Chrome thing wouldn't choose to paste HTML, given the choice.

@tailsteak well they could change the font to wingdings, for starters

@charlotte @0xabad1dea

@0xabad1dea at least partly, because this normalizes pasting screenshots.

Hence, I have adapted this handy keyboard shortcut: CtrlvCtrlzCtrlShiftv

And yes, there is some swearing involved cursing everybody that thought changing the pasting by text keyboard shortcut to pasting with formatting and introducing a separate new keyboard shortcut for the old behavior would be anywhere near okay.

@0xabad1dea

That's wild!

@0xabad1dea https://evercoder.github.io/clipboard-inspector/ shows the formats really well, at least in Firefox.

@0xabad1dea That's bizarre, and a good reason to not use OneNote.

@foxyoreos it apparently pre-loads the image as one option yes, but the receiving apps take the image because they assume the text option is just, like, the image’s file name as a fallback, because who Does This

@nils_ballmann @0xabad1dea There is a need for a page like https://nohello.net but for "no screenshots". I also have team members who prefer to send me a screenshot instead of copy & pasting their code in chat.

@raimue @0xabad1dea not a bad idea...

@raimue @nils_ballmann @0xabad1dea I blame one part JavaScript and one part Apple. JavaScript broke the text nature of the web such what you saw on the screen wasn’t text document anymore. Then Apple replaced everyone’s computer something that didn’t support copy/paste so everyone learned to take screenshots.

@Jmj @raimue @nils_ballmann as a heavy Apple user, I am surprised to learn I haven’t been using copy/paste a hundred times a day the last twenty years

@0xabad1dea @raimue @nils_ballmann https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/20/apple-engineer-first-iphone-copy-and-paste/

@Jmj @raimue @nils_ballmann I knew one (1) single person who had a first-model iPhone, I don't think the fact that there was a window from 2007-2008 where some tiny fraction of humanity had a phone that was slightly more advanced than most other phones but couldn't copy-paste and otherwise clearly wasn't a general personal computing device somehow redefined humanity's relationship to the existence of copy-paste

@0xabad1dea @Jmj @raimue I agree.

To to make you all feel old: IIRC my dad was doing the notepad dance on Windows since ~2005.

But that may be – as a Linux user – my anti-Window-bias speaking...

I just wonder how and why it got introduced in that way also on Linux. Because I don't remember the starting point of that.