How to copy and preserve text formatting from a website, when pasting on SE?

Question

How can formatting from websites be copied and pasted, or efficiently replicated? I must eschew pasting only text and then formatting myself from scratch. E.g. Etymonline and Wiktionary contain bolds, italics, underlining, hyperlinks.

Answer 1

At present, I copy and paste with the right cursor on the mouse, but then I must unproductively add * * to each italicised phrase, and ** ** to each bolded phrase. How can I improve this?

There are browser extensions that allow you to copy formatted text to the clipboard as markdown. For instance, you can use this extension on Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/copy-as-markdown/dgoenpnkphkichnohepecnmpmihnabdg?hl=en

Here's one for Safari:

http://crateofpenguins.com/blog/2013-3-service-safari-selection-to-clipboard-as-markdown-quote

And if you're on OS X you'll want to take a look at these markdown tools:

http://brettterpstra.com/projects/markdown-service-tools/

Which provide a great deal of flexibility in converting to and from markdown from a variety of other formats and services.

It is unlikely that Stack Exchange will provide these services.

Answer 2

Data on the clipboard frequently has multiple types. You can see how this works when you use Paste Special in Microsoft Word:

These data types are called MIME types, or sometimes Content-types. Here are some example text types that are defined:

• text/asp
• text/css
• text/html
• text/javascript
• text/plain
• text/richtext

The application that is receiving the paste, such as Microsoft Word or the question editing panel has to know what to do with a particular content type.

Now, consider the fact the text syntax we use (e.g. **text**) formats text using a method called Markdown, which converts the syntax to HTML. Similarly, JIRA uses its own syntax to convert plain text to HTML formatted text.

Now, consider the problem that would be faced: when pasting, Stack Exchange would have to somehow capture the HTML formatted text and then use that to re-generate Markdown syntax, from a source that could be generated from anywhere, not just another Markdown interpreter. Can you imagine how difficult that process might be? This is especially true when you begin to consider CSS: some sites might use <b></b> for bold, and other sites might use CSS and <div></div> for everything, and there are still other ways to do it. HTML and CSS are, themselves, complicated programming languages, not parseable by regex.

The bottom line is, this would be a very difficult problem. Further, there is a lot of pushback against doing it in the first place (Thanks @HomegrownTomato) this will almost certainly never happen on Stack Exchange.