Most people have a handful of notes in different formats that need to be "transcribed" to Twiki. The easiest (and most obvious) way to do that is to cut/paste the text/only version of the document, with minor adaptations.

One common problem I face is the behavior of the "bullet" (and numbered lists too) formatting. If I have a multi-line paragraph that needs to be converted into a bullet item, just adding three spaces and one "*" won't do because Twiki only considers it to be part of the original line if there are no new-lines or the remaining lines are indented three spaces from the left.

This also happens with numbered lists.

-- MarcoPaganini - 10 Mar 2001

I agree. One of the things I want to bring in are emails which initially I would like to be able to just cut & paste from LotusNotes. (There is a whole story here, probably worthy of a discussion, about BringingUsersInFromAnEmailSystem).

Being email means we have headers in the text that can be pretty long. An email might look like this in plaintext:

---

To: Martin.Cleaver@SPAMTHESPAMMERS.org.uk
Subject: Test email

This is an email to test the treatment of headers in TWiki.

---

When I paste it it looks like this:

---

To: Martin.Cleaver@SPAMTHESPAMMERSPLEASENOSPAM.org.uk Subject: Test email

This is an email to test the treatment of headers in TWiki.

---

Now, how I might like to render it is like this:

---

To	Martin.Cleaver@SPAMTHESPAMMERSPLEASENOSPAM.org.uk
Subject	Test email

This is an email to test the treatment of headers in TWiki.

---

Now, I can't add a blanket rule to render Text: stuff as | Text | stuff as it screws all sorts of things. Perhaps I need a plug-in to parse and format the mail as it comes in (or maybe to surround the mail with a pair of tags to invoke a different rendering rule). Maybe I need a special form on which to paste the content. Hmm. Warrants a FeatureBrainstorming session perhaps.

---

Yes, you're right! I have to edit the entire email manually on the crippled editor offered by the browser. Ouch! Well, I believe I could write a filter to parse most common structures into something that Twiki likes, but again, a FeatureBrainstorming session might be the right thing to do here.

-- MarcoPaganini - 11 Mar 2001

Getting email into TWiki in a nice manner is something that interests me. I actually haven't looked at the practical side of an interface for data entry. Providing a generic mechanism to allow arbitary cut&paste is quite a nice idea.

My idea would be to introduce the concept of a container within the text body. Something like:

<container> container stuff </container>

This container would signal to the render pipeline to pass off the contents of the container to a specific render plugin.

ie. You could have a RFC email to TWiki render plugin.

-- NicholasLee - 11 Mar 2001

On a similar subject, how about a mechanism to allow someone to AttachPicturesFromClipboard? It would be so useful but I've no idea how to implement it.

-- MartinCleaver - 12 Mar 2001

Removed <pre> email addresses to avoid spamming.

-- MartinCleaver - 27 Jul 2003