Bold Texts

[spekulatius]

Hey @euangoddard

super long shoot here. I know well this might never happen. I still give it a try. I noticed all bold texts are dropped when I use https://euangoddard.github.io/clipboard2markdown/. Any chance this could be added?

Cheers, Peter

[euangoddard]

Thanks for reporting this. It would be good to have a reproduction of this. If I had to guess then I would suspect that the bold text in the source only appears bold and isn't actually marked as bold in a way the processor understands, i.e. it has some style applied to make it seem bold. Whenever I have tested this with formatted text it always translates correctly. Perhaps if you can attach an example source document I can have a look at what's going on?

[spekulatius]

Hello @euangoddard,

yeah, I understand it might look bold, but isn't actually bolded. Just displayed like this.

It's happening when I use Google Docs. I've created an example here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17tpX1h53phZ-64uP4flTiOJIMQrpvEuCcdf49hdvV2A/edit?usp=sharing

Cheers, Peter

[euangoddard]

I suspect it is a google docs issue. When you export a google doc as HTML I know the bold sections in there aren't represented with <strong> or <b> tags but are simply styled so I suspect this has the same root cause as is manifesting here. It would be pretty hard to solve the problem - you'd have to detect styles that looked bold and then convert those, on the fly, to semantically bold tags prior to processing. Happy to consider any PR that addresses this

[spekulatius]

Hmmm, okay. I guessed something along these lines when opening the issue. I've seen the bold part working with other sources. So I guessed there is something non-standard going on.

I've got limited time atm. For the next weeks surely no time for any side-projects. Maybe after this period.

[euangoddard]

Fantastic that you're at least keen to try! I think it could be really quite a tricky problem to solve as you'll need to traverse the entire node tree and replace styles that look bold with semantic elements. Good luck!

[spekulatius]

That sounds like an interesting challenge. Not sure I'll manage tho

[DanielOaks]

Hmm, I might not make a full PR for this, but adding this to clipboard2markdown.js has worked for converting Reddit's bold text properly for me:

    {
      filter: function (node) {
        // TODO: check other font-weights
        return node.style.fontWeight && (node.style.fontWeight > 500);
      },
      replacement: function (content) {
        return '**' + content + '**';
      }
    },

[euangoddard]

That's interesting. I am current re-writing the project from scratch at the moment and can definitely include this patch in there. It makes sense to me to support these visually styled bold elements

[colinbrislawn]

Supporting Italics would be nice as well! My use case is also Google Docs -> Markdown

[euangoddard]

@colinbrislawn that's interesting that google docs paste doesn't support italics. When I've looked into this previously it seemed to work. I know that some rich text editors don't implement the rich text as semantic elements which makes it quite difficult to resolve the original author's formatting intent. The approach mentioned by @DanielOaks could certainly be used for the italic approach as well.

[mackaaij]

Just experienced the same using text copied from SharePoint/Word using macOS Safari. Headers would be nice too, which comes across via "data-ccp-parastyle" according to https://dynalist.io/clipboard