Atto: Paste special
atto_pastespecial
Maintained by 
Joseph Inhofer
Joseph InhoferPasteSpecial button for Atto reduces clutter when pasting from non-Atto text editors.
618 sites
90 downloads
23 fans
Moodle 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 3.0
This is a plugin for Atto editor in Moodle that allows the user to paste content from several different rich formatting areas and either import the styling or import as unformatted text. To install, unpack to lib/editor/atto/plugins/pastespecial and visit the admin notifications page to install. Then add the button on that Atto toolbar settings page. The pastespecial settings page can be used to configure the allowed styles when importing formatting.
Pastespecial now "allows" tables (as of version 2016021100). It gets pasted in as normal without any handling. I STRONGLY encourage you to create your tables within Atto, but apparently not enough to artificially prohibit this.
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http://integration.moodle.org/job/Precheck%20remote%20branch/16260/artifact/work/smurf.html
Thanks Joseph for sharing the plugin with the community. I can confirm I was able to successfully install and use the plugin. I have not spotted approval blockers while reviewing the code. Let me just recommend to fix the issues detected by our automated coding style checker scripts. Most of them are quite easy to fix formal issues related to the coding style. Related to that, you may want to re-check the https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Plugin_contribution_checklist#Boilerplate section in the checklist.
Assuming the raised issues will be fixed in a future update, you are cleared to land now. Welcome to the Plugins directory.
I have updated the code as per the prechecker suggestions. Is there a way to run it again and see if all of the issues have been corrected and if any new ones arise?
So I installed it on my test drive. It seems to pass some styles per default:
I made an experiment in Chrome:
1. create a simple paragraph
2. do cut & paste
3. paste from word
4. paste from other.
The raw HTML looks like this. You can see that direct paste adds a lot of styles. Add "from word" and "add from other" yields the same result. I added a style named "foo" to the configuration of "paste from other", just to ensure that no hidden default (e.g. the one from word) is applied. But color and font size are always pasted.
Simple paragraph with bold .
-------------------- direct paste
Simple paragraph with bold .
-------------------- paste from other
Simple paragraph with bold .
--------------------- paste from word
Simple paragraph with bold .
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I still find ATTO being indeed simpler to use than TinyMce but, the generated HTML is still not optimal (not to say a nightmare). You can see that the paste
<p>paragraph="" with=""
<b="">bold .</b=""> </p> <p></p> <p> <br> </p> <p>-------------------- direct paste</p> <p> </p> <p style="margin: 0px 0px 10px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Simple paragraph with <b>bold</b> .</p> <br>-------------------- paste from other
<p></p> <p> </p> <p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);font-size: 14px;">Simple paragraph with <b>bold</b> .</p>
<p>--------------------- paste from word</p> <p></p> <p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);font-size: 14px;">Simple paragraph with <b>bold</b> .</p> <p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);font-size: 14px;"> <br> </p> <p></p> <p></p> <p></p>
We've been using this plugin and it's great!
We've tried the 'Set as default' option and realized it is quite aggressive (many people are used to paste with 'Ctrl+V' and complained because they want it to do just that), but a user came with another option that I'd like to see in this plugin: the option to trigger Paste Special when the user types 'Ctrl+Shift+V', as this is the special paste command used in other software. This could added as another option to the actual 'Set as default' setting: Disabled, Set as default Ctrl+V, Set as default Ctrl+Shift+V (new).
Thank you for your suggestion! The latest version, 2016031100, does have the "set as default" setting changed to a single select that has the options of "none", "ctrl+v", and "ctrl+shift+v". Let me know if this is different from what you'd like, or if you'd be interested in having any more improvements to this plugin.
It does just what I expected. I think the most reasonable default value is "Ctrl+Shift+V" as you decided so it couldn't be better
Great work Joseph!
Any chance that we might be seeing a version of Paste Special that is compatible with newer releases of Moodle (3.1 to 3.4) in the near future or have you abandoned the project? I could really use this functionality in Moodle 3.4.
Best regards,
Michael
Hope to see a version of Paste Special for Moodle 3.5 in the near future.
Best regards,
Michael