I have recently experienced that by exporting my text to word, I lost most of the text.
What is the problem?
Is there a solution for this?
RC
How are you “exporting” to (Microsoft) Word? Are you using the clipboard, a particular action, something else?
What do you mean by “most”? Can you provide details of the originating text in Drafts and what the result was in Word? Currently we don’t have an example to derive any sort of pattern from. It could be every other word, three out of five paragraphs at random, text from the start, text from the end, the end of each paragraph,…
Hi!
I used to methods to export text to word: 1) Open Rich Text in Word, 2) Copy as Rich Text.
It is easier to say that I kept only the first two to three paragraphs out of ten paragraphs.
After using the method 1, I lost completely the text after running the action. While the method 2, only pasted the first paragraphs.
#1 I assume is this action:
#2 I assume is one of these two, and probably the earlier one.
https://directory.getdrafts.com/search&q=Copy+as+rich+text
So you are losing text at the end. Maybe after some volume of data or after some specific content. Again, as noted above, without an example to reproduce with we have a little gueswork in order to test independently and investigate.
That is quite interesting as both approaches, based on the links above, would be populating via the clipboard using practically the same code. Different results would certainly suggest something strange going on.
Does pasting the resulting rich text into another app supporting rich text yield an identical result? Do the volumes of text make a difference? Also what platform/device are you getting thesetruncation results on?
The pasting results were differents.
Yes, it was a high volume text (a response to about 40 reviewers’ comments for a manuscript of mine).
I wonder if the volume is a limitation for the app, it ended up as a 6500 words document.
I did not try to any other app, since I was running out of time, and loosing the data once force me to start again with a different app.
When you lose the text, are you still able to see previous versions of the draft?
In case you need it, here are instructions on accessing versions:
I was unable to find the file.
This is a very useful tip!
Thank you!
I will; assume you are doing this on the Mac as you have not responded to my platform/device question. That is where I have carried out my testing for this.
Here is a set of lorem ipsum text. It is 300 paragraphs totalling 26,804 words.
If I use this action, which I believe is the most likely action you are using to copy rich text to the clipboard, put the lorem ipsum text into Drafts, run the action, and then paste the result it into Word, I get 26,804 words pasted into Word (the first 150 paragraphs in bold and the second is a repeat, but not bold).
This is over four times the volume you were getting across, which would suggest that volume is not the issue here.
ACTION: Try the above text for yourself and see if you get the same result when pasting into Word.
With this in mind, and assuming you get a similar result to me, I would start looking at the details of the text. As previously noted, you have not shared an example for us to reproduce the issue with, so it is something you would have to do yourself.
Try splitting the feedback into smaller chunks and converting those. Continue to copy across until you hit the first truncation (this can also inform where you start based on your observations so far). Keep making the chunks smaller until you get to a small manageable chunk that will not copy across.
Hopefully, when you see it, you will get a sense of why it might be causing an issue. If you don’t, then consider posting that chunk so that others can try and reproduce your issue with it.
ACTION: Try the above to see if you can narrow down something not-volume related that is causing your issue.
I would hope that is only a temporary limitation in your ability to test that, but based on my testing as noted above, I suspect your issue is linked to your content more than the volume of content or the destination app.
Can you share a link to the actions you are using. None of the actions I referenced originally can cause data loss in Drafts unless something is going *really* wrong with your setup. Those actions are copying data out of Drafts and not replacing anything. If it was replacing, then the version history as @ShriM notes should have you covered.
However, it may be you have a default set so that running an action is archiving or trashing a draft. In those cases, you should find your original draft in the archive or draft folders/tabs - the following links provide information about how that works.
ACTION: Try looking in folders other than your inbox to find your lost data.
ACTION: Check your actions and settings to see if you are explicitly or implicitly (by default) moving your drafts to trash or archive after running one of your ‘copy’ actions.
Note also that to use the version history, you also have to find the draft … which could be in any of the folders if you are running post-success/failure updates on a draft.
Please share the results from the above.
I don’t believe he is reporting text being lost in Drafts, just that some of it does not transfer to Word when pasted. @Roberto_Carlos_Castr, is that correct?
If so, I do believe it’s likely something about the text being sent. You could also try opening an HTML preview of the draft and copying the rich text from that web view.