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Text Formatting Lost When Copying

Bug Reports

When text is copied from T3 Chat (which displays rich text formatting like bolding, italics, lists, links) and subsequently pasted into any WYSIWYG text editor (e.g., email, word), all original formatting is lost. The pasted content appears as plain text.

Status: Completed13 comments

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Comments13

  • Indigo Peacock

    This only happens when using keyboard Control-C/Control-V.

    Issue does not occur when drag+dropping text between windows

  • Crimson Prairie

    quite annoying behaviour that should be easy to fix

    • Mark Florkowski

      Team

      It has been fixed, are you still encountering issues with this?

      • Crimson Prairie

        yes, I still can see it when I copy some from chat to gmail. It loses paragraph styling. Other styles like bold, italic or font size seems to be stable

        • Mark Florkowski

          Team

          Can you clarify what you mean by paragraph styling? like headings? or newlines?

          • Crimson Prairie

            made a quick test. if paragaraphs have one headings (aka font size) and some newlines, then by cmd+v copying, you are loosing these newlines, but by cmd+shift+v you got them correct.

            iirc the correct behaviour is vice versa, cmd+v should copy with style (and newlines), while cmd+shift+v should do it without any formatting/styling.

          • Crimson Prairie

            would be as follows with cmd+v copying
            “Certainly! Here are three short random Lorem Ipsum paragraphs, all in the same style, separated by new lines:Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod, urna eu tincidunt consectetur, nisi erat facilisis enim, nec dictum ex enim nec urna. Proin ac velit nec sapien dictum cursus.Suspendisse potenti. Mauris euismod, justo at dictum cursus, enim erat dictum urna, nec facilisis enim enim nec urna. Etiam ac velit nec sapien dictum cursus.Curabitur non nulla sit amet nisl tempus convallis quis ac lectus. Nulla porttitor accumsan tincidunt. Pellentesque in ipsum id orci porta dapibus.”

  • Crimson Shark

    Hi @Mark Florkowski ,

    Apologies for the delayed response to the updates here.

    Today, I've been re-evaluating the text copying behavior from T3 Chat on Firefox + Windows and have observed a few different outcomes based on the method used:

    • Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V (Standard Copy/Paste): When selecting styled text within a T3 Chat AI response and using Ctrl+C to copy, then Ctrl+V to paste into an application like Microsoft Word, some basic styling (e.g., bolding, italics, and lists) is now retained. This is an improvement from before.

    • Drag-and-Drop: If styled text is selected in T3 Chat and then dragged directly into Word, a more comprehensive level of styling is preserved, including headings, fonts, and potentially other rich text elements.

    • "Copy message" UI Button: Utilizing the "Copy message" button at the bottom of a T3 Chat AI response currently copies the text in Markdown format, rather than the rendered styled version.

    The current behavior presents three distinct ways to copy text, each preserving a different level of formatting. Is this the intended design?

    My expectation for consistent behavior would be for Ctrl+C and the dedicated "Copy" UI button to behave similarly to the drag-and-drop method, meaning they should copy and paste all available styling. When a user needs plain text instead, on Windows, they can always use Ctrl+Shift+V to paste without formatting.

    Perhaps future enhancements could include offering more explicit copy options within the UI, such as "Copy Raw AI Response," "Copy Without Style," "Copy With Style (Rich Text)," "Copy as Markdown," or "Copy as HTML." I understand this last suggestion leans more towards a feature request than a bug report. ;-)

    I hope this clarifies my observations. Please let me know if anything is unclear, or if you'd like me to share a screen recording to demonstrate the behavior.

    Cheers,

    Tim

    • Mark Florkowski

      Team

      “Copy message” is intended to be markdown - This is the same behavior as chatgpt

      Drag and drop copying is unfortunately not something we have control over, it is controlled by the browser/OS

      Ctrl+C/V Should copy all formatting, including bold/italic, lists, tables, headings, etc.

      I just tested between T3 Chat and ChatGPT and we have matching or better formatting as far as I can tell?

      ChatGPT:


      T3 Chat:



      Are you able to share an example of something that you have found to be not working?

      • Crimson Shark

        Hi Mark,

        Since T3 started I have not used the ChatGPT chat window so I would not know how it works over there these days ;-)

        Got it. So when "Copy message" is intended to do markdown it works indeed as design, good. Dragging and dropping is a browser/OS behavior, I did not know that. Nice!

        Tested Ctrl+C/V again and that works for almost all styling, only not for the headings:

        • Mark Florkowski

          Team

          That’s a bit odd that headings did not work for you, it might be some difference between how Google Docs and Microsoft Word handle the pasted formatting, as there is no real “standard” and every software implements it a bit differently 😭

          • Crimson Shark

            Hey, you are right. Google Docs does pick up the headings with the Ctrl+C/V method. Tested it in Basecamp and even in WordPress as well, and also there it's fine. So it's MS Word that's weird. No surprise there, I guess 🤣

            • Mark Florkowski

              Team

              Oh Microsoft 😅 Glad we could get to the bottom of it though!