Limiting Paste to "Paste as Text"

[john@winster.org]

There are several old threads about this, but I want to check that I understand the current situation.

If I want to prevent users from pasting FORMATTED text, and restrict them to pasting just UNFORMATTED text (which they can then style according to the restricted set of options I have set in my Editor Group), how do I do this?

I can remove "Paste" and "Paste as Word" buttons - but the right-click menu still offers a normal (ie formatted) Paste. And Control-V does a formatted Paste. There seems to be no way to constain these. Is that really right?

I let my real-life users edit their personal profiles on a page using Snippetmaster - and the result is a complete dog's breakfast because they have used Control-V or Right-click and brought in lots of unwanted formatting. It's not even the same for each user, as their various Word settings are different.

Am I really right in concluding that all my efforts to achieve a limited-style page have been wasted? It seems that limiting the button set without being able to constrain control-V or limit right-click options is like adding locks to the front door of a house with the back door left wide open! Please tell me there is an optional control I have missed - if not, I am gutted to have invested so much time on Snippetmaster only to find a "feature" that makes it unusable for what I reckon is a pretty normal application.

[Jenkinhill]

I provide many users with a copy of NoteTab Lite and the editing instructions tell them to copy whatever they want to add to the web page into NoteTab first, and then to copy it from there into the editor. Thus the junk formatting from Word or whatever is lost and there is more consistency on the published pages.

[john@winster.org]

Thanks - one could use Notepad the same way, I guess. There again, if issuing instructions, you can say "Do NOT use right-click or Control-V: only use the Paste-as-Text button".

But any leave-a-pitfall-but-give-a-warning approach like this turns the user experience from "No training needed - just use your previous experience of Windows" to "follow these instructions to do things a special way, and if you forget, you will mess things up" - which is considerably less of a sales pitch to the end user.

John Geddes