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Clean MS Word Formatting

This article explains how RadEditor handles content pasted from MS Word, and what built-in mechanisms are available to control the pasting behavior.

RadEditor provides a number of tools that help users paste formatted text from MS Word, which, as a result is cleaned from unnecessary tags, comments and MS-Word-specific style formatting attributes.

As of IE11, Microsoft have included a built-in mechanism that handles the HTML formatting when pasting MS Word content. Due to that, RadEditor has minor control over the MS Word content pasted under Internet Explorer 11.You can find more details about the browser dependency when pasting in the RadEditor in the Pasting in RadEditor article.

Figure 1: MS Word content is pasted as proper HTML markup in the RadEditor.

pasting-in-editor

Strip MS Word Content via Paste Tools

RadEditor exposes two easy-to-use built-in tools, which enable end-users to get proper HTML from pasted MS Word content - Paste from Word (in Figure 1) and Paste from Word, strip font.

These tools are categorized as built-in clipboard tools. You can find more details about how they behave in the Using the Built-in Clipboard Tools section of the Overview article.

Automatic On-paste Content Stripping

The StripFormattingOptions property replaces the deprecated StripFormattingOnPaste property.

The major RadEditor mechanism for on-paste content cleaning and stripping is the StripFormattingOptions functionality. It enables you to choose a specific configuration of generic or MS-Word-specific stripping options to be processed during paste. In the lists below you can find all possible options:

Generic options:

  • All - strips all HTML formatting and pastes plain text.
  • AllExceptNewLines - clears all tags except
    and new lines (\n) on paste.
  • Css - strips CSS styles on paste.
  • Font - strips Font tags on paste.
  • None - pastes the clipboard content as is. If MS Word formatting exists, the user is prompted to clean it.
  • NoneSupressCleanMessage - does not strip anything on paste and does not show the prompt about MS Word content being pasted (see Overview article).
  • Span - strips Span tags on paste.

MS Word specific options:

  • ConvertWordLists - converts Word ordered/unordered lists to HTML tags.
  • MSWord - strips Word-specific tags on Paste, preserving fonts and text sizes.
  • MSWordNoFonts - strips Word-specific tags on paste, preserving text sizes only.
  • MSWordNoMargins - strips Word-specific tags and margins, preserving fonts and text sizes.
  • MSWordRemoveAll - strips Word-specific tag on paste, removing both fonts and text sizes.

Enabling the NoneSupressCleanMessage option, will prevent the client-side OnClientPasteHtml event from firing when using the native browser paste options (the browser’s context menu, or the Ctrl+V shortcut).

Example 1: How to set multiple values to the StripFormattingOptions property.

<telerik:RadEditor RenderMode="Lightweight" runat="server" ID="RadEditor1" StripFormattingOptions="MsWord,Span,Css,ConvertWordLists">
</telerik:RadEditor>
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    RadEditor1.StripFormattingOptions = EditorStripFormattingOptions.Span | EditorStripFormattingOptions.MSWordRemoveAll;
}
Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
    RadEditor1.StripFormattingOptions = EditorStripFormattingOptions.Span Or EditorStripFormattingOptions.MSWordRemoveAll
End Sub

Optionally, you can use the client-side fire method to strip the content on submit or on page-load. This approach is showcased in the Clean MS Word Formatting on Page Load and on Submit article.

See Also

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