nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Copy-and-paste support for Google Docs

PeterKnoop

Currently, when one attempts to copy-and-paste text from a Google Doc into a StoryMap the text may later unexpectedly disappear and cannot be recovered from within the StoryMap. For example, see the thread under Pasted Bulleted Text from Google Docs Disappears Unexpectedly, as well as other posts about "disappearing text" in StoryMaps.

While the root cause of the issue may lay with bad HTML formatting on Google's part, it would be very helpful if Esri found a way to support the normal cut-and-paste workflow between Docs and StoryMaps.

As a Google organization this is very problematic as Google Docs is the default editor for people crafting their story text outside of StoryMaps. Furthermore, the failure mode here is not obvious to users, so self-discovery of the suggested workaround is not intuitive.

Perhaps the paste step on the StoryMaps side could always be handled as paste without formatting or as plain text?

Najděte více příspěvků označených jako

Working with text

Collaboration

In Product Plan

Status: In Product Plan

Komentáře

PatriciaCarbajales-Dale

Hi Peter and Owen,

Not sure if this should be a different idea, or can be combined with yours, but one improvement to story maps would be the option to move or copy and paste content in the story map without having to go paragraph by paragraph.

It is a nightmare every time we want to rearrange content within the same story map that we have to copy and paste line by line, item by item. It would be great to be able to:

- Move the desired content from within the same story map from one section to another. And keep the formatting would be amazing too! (headings, large paragraph, etc)

- Being able to move sections as needed

- Copy sections from one story map to another

- Being able to select a large section on the story map and hit delete instead of delete every single element one by one

Basically things that you can easily do in Google Docs, would be amazing to have that when editing story maps. Thank you for your consideration 🙂

ShanaCrosson2

Thank you @OwenGeo! Most of the problems we ran into were from students reporting issues. It's hard to have them try to replicate, but I did have one staff person we asked to test. I will let you know as soon as I hear back from them.

oevans_storymaps

Thanks for testing @PeterKnoop! Sounds like your experience tracks with what we've seen -- if an author quickly tries to preview or publish immediately/shortly after pasting, there can sometimes still be a situation where the text disappears, but when working at a more natural pace this issue does not occur.

As I mentioned, we're still looking at other cases and ways to tighten this up even more, so stay tuned for more fixes in this area.

PeterKnoop

@OwenGeo Tested out some of the content that originally brought the issue to light. It appears that it is behaving better in some cases, in that pasted content is no longer un-retrievably disappearing all the time. There are certain combinations, however, where text is still disappearing, and there are some minor oddities in the user experience for Previewing.

If one Previews a story, right after pasting what seems like any text with multiple paragraphs from a Google Doc, then the text doesn't show up in the Preview. If you close the Preview, however, the text is still there, so at least it is not getting lost. If you immediately open Preview again, then the text shows just fine. And, if you Publish the story (with or without Previewing) the text is retained and appears as expected.

If you specifically copy a bulleted list from a Google Doc, which has several bullet points, and paste it into the StoryMap, then it appears as expected. However, the text sometimes still disappears permanently when you Preview or Publish the story right after pasting the text. Not sure why in only happens in some cases... maybe tied to the number of bullet points, maybe the length of the text in the points?

Pasting from Google Docs as plain text or without style continues to work correctly.

oevans_storymaps

@PeterKnoop @ShanaCrosson2 and others following this thread....

We just deployed an update that should address most cases of the issue described above (content from Google Docs pasted into a story that disappears after reloading the builder or publishing a story).

We have been working on this for a while and identified a partial solution we wanted to deploy as soon as we felt comfortable with the testing. We also have some additional changes that we are looking into to try to cover more cases and further improve the experience when pasting formatted text from Google Docs (as well as Microsoft Word).

It would be helpful if anyone affected by this issue could please do some quick testing to see if you are still encountering this issue and report any observations here.

oevans_storymaps

Wanted to provide an update that our development team is actively working on a resolution for this issue. We will provide another update when we have more to share.

ShanaCrosson2

Peter and Owen - thanks for this post and response. We experienced several incidents of this this semester. When someone asks about the problem, we can address it, but it's those who don't ask and just get frustrated. Part of the issue is that we encourage students to write their content in a Google Doc either for collaboration with other students or to turn in to the instructor for editing (instructors like Google Docs better than a StoryMap because it's easier to make comments/edits.)

PeterKnoop

@OwenGeo -- Glad to hear this is on the radar for the coming Northern Hemisphere school year! I look forward to whatever creative way you all come up with to address this! (Perhaps you could test the validity of the HTML, and if it isn't properly formatted, strip the HTML, and paste as plain text?)

oevans_storymaps

@PeterKnoop -- Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. We do understand this is a confusing issue that is impacting students and others who use Google Docs, and we are committed to addressing it. Unfortunately, as discussed on the other thread, there's no easy or consequence-free solution on our side because of the external constraints present in this situation. So we have to take time to research and weigh the options available to us, and that is what we are currently doing.

Regarding your suggestion to strip formatting in all cases, that is something we are considering. However, we're hesitant to downgrade the experience authors are getting from copying text from pages/apps that use properly formatted HTML (such as Wikipedia, W3Schools, and many others) because of other sites that don't follow conventions. That said, we also realize there are certain sites authors are more likely to be copying text from, so the best option may be to prioritize the experience from those sites at the expense of the others. And currently, for authors who are aware, there are workarounds to manually paste/import text without formatting that address this issue.

I'm marking this as In product plan, because our goal is to get this issue addressed in some form in the late summer/early fall, ideally before or right around when students come back to school for the next academic year.

Připojte se k diskusi

Přihlaste se pro psaní příspěvků, sledování obsahu a další. Jste tu noví? Zaregistrujte se zdarma.