Clients want to copy / paste from word processors; rich-text editors will make this a mess. How do we solve this?

Question

After many years of experience working with CMS-systems to order, I came to the following conclusion:

• Customers really want to copy and paste information from word processors into their CMS website. They do not like to create large texts in the block of the website and prefer to do it from their old old word processor. Or they simply have their own text, already prepared for other purposes, and therefore want to copy and paste.
• Customers do not like to lose their format. They spent time on their bold text, headings, etc., and they do not like to do it again and again.
• Rich Text Format fields (TinyMCE, CKEditor, etc.) are not yet able to correctly convert all formatted text to the correct HTML. I do not blame them; this should be very difficult, given the odd "source code" that word processors put on the clipboard. But, reading all the SO topics about richttext issues, I find this a known limitation.

What do you do in such cases? I tried the following:

• First explain to the client that this is not a word processor that we implement, and it has limitations. They can understand, but still want to copy and paste.
• Show very few buttons for formatting (bold, italics, links). That way, we can separate the tags and clear them well enough, and this limits the problems. Works better, but clients keep asking for font options, more colors, headers, etc.

So not a good solution in sight. Are there others who have successfully dealt with this problem?

Answer 1

I completely agree with you:

Last week I did a very interesting test with a client, for which I had to prepare a demo version of CMS-systems based on .NET (Umbraco, Sitefinity, DNN, Composite C1 ect). The client itself had a Drupal-based site, and I was ashamed that not one of my CMS demos did 100% work with a complex Word table (Ceteris paribus: I didn’t fine-tune CMS, used every CMS out of the box) . The worst part of his Drupal CMS did a 100% good job! It was the same as in the Word. For a client who works a lot with Word, my CMS-ses were showstopper. Of course, there is a lot of discussion on the Internet about "you should not copy from Word" or "DO NOT use Word for CMS." Fact: Clients work with Word, so we have to deal with this.

Answer 2

One solution (and probably the best I came up with) is to post-process the inserted content. So, catch the publish event and fix all the crappy HTML - catch all the "mso-normal" styles, for example, and delete them. You will have a set of rules that clean the material, for example, MS Word.

Although this is not just a word processing problem. You paste one rich text editor into another, and the styles just don't get transferred between rich editing environments. This is not so much a technical problem as logical problems.

Update: Someone pointed me to this: Copying attachments to a web CMS . No real solutions, but just a confirmation that this is a sticky problem.