pasting from G Docs into WP — how to preserve embedded links?

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  colmanating · Member · May 28, 2016 at 1:39 pm

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  Hey there,

  Help!

  I am an editor and daily WP poster who gets a lot of posts in (via MS word or Google Docs) from a lot of different people — and many of the posts contain a lot of embedded hyperlinks as well as a variety of formatting code, all pretty standard.

  The easiest way to get rid of the problematic formatting code is to paste the post into WP as text. But that also gets rid of all the links. I could paste it as formatted text, preserving the links, but then I would have to go in and remove all the crazy little bits of formatting code that invariably end up all over docs like this.

  I need some kind of middle ground that strips the code and keeps the links.

  I tried using a variety of Markdown add-ons — an app, a script — but these stripped out the links as well as the formatting.

  I was able to paste the text into a MS word window in HTML format which spelled out the links. So I could paste that as text into WP — this way I didn’t have to go and copy each of the links from the old text, just repaste them into the new text in WP, but it’s still a hassle — some posts can contain as many as 30 links!

  Any suggestions are most appreciated!

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  justjennifer · Member · May 28, 2016 at 2:48 pm

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  As ideas.ted.com is a WordPressdotcom VIP customer, you should have direct access to the VIP private support portal located in your site’s Dashboard. If you aren’t able to locate that, you may need to be logged in with a different username account.

  Regardless, I’ve gone ahead and tagged this for Staff assistance.

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  colmanating · Member · May 28, 2016 at 3:01 pm

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  Thank you. I am in touch with the Word Press staff on the issue and so far they don’t have a fix for it.

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  justjennifer · Member · May 28, 2016 at 3:31 pm

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  My gut feeling is that if Staff haven’t been able to come up with a method for preserving the links when copying/pasting, then there probably isn’t one.

  One of the newer features of the WP Editor is that you can simply highlight text and then paste in a link (temporary screenshot), although this may call for a change in the way those links are given to you. Perhaps they can be added following the text that is supposed to be highlighted.

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  colmanating · Member · May 28, 2016 at 3:58 pm

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  Yes that’s the workaround I am planning on using.