Send a message: formatting not copying to message

Bishopric members keep accidentally sending messages to the whole ward without formatting. They are composing messages in apps like Word etc. and then copy/pasting the message into the composer on LCR. This is partly because a message might be started by someone outside the bishopric and then sent to us to do the sending. What usually happens is the formatting appears correct in the composer on LCR, but gets sent in a block of plain text. I can replicate this by writing Rich Text content in TextEdit and pasting that over.

One solution I've come up with for my own messages is to compose a message in Markdown and convert to Rich Text with an iOS Shortcut and paste that, but I can't figure out an easy way to automatically reformat content in Word etc. without just removing all formatting and re-formatting the text in the composer. Has anyone else figured out how to do this?

I suggest you use the "Do you have feedback on this page" link on the lower-right of the Send a Message page and let them know of your difficulties. I guess what's really bad is it appears from your comments that it looks like the formatting pasted okay, but then it sends as plain text. It looks like the page uses the TinyMCE editor, which has free and paid versions. Depending on whether or not the church uses the paid version, they may have more flexibility in handling formatted text. I noticed one feature of the paid version is better handling of formatted text from Word.

This is a user-support forum. Sometimes church employees are active on this forum, but the way to make sure they know of your concerns is through that feedback link. It doesn't mean it will change, but at least the people who can do something about the problem will be aware of it.

Copy/pasting rich text from Microsoft Word brings along a lot of extra hidden XML tags that Word uses to do more precise formatting and styling. The hidden tags add a lot of bulk and can cause display issues, depending on which program is trying to interpret the code. Because of that, many online rich text editors just strip out the formatting tags when copy/pasting from Word.

I know that we did not add any intentional support for pasting from Word in the original release of that function. I don't know whether that was added in later changes that I didn't handle. I would send feedback so that it can work its way through to the product manager.

Not sure if it is applicable to this thread, but I do my newsletter in Notes on either my iMac, iPhone, or iPad. Notes syncs almost immediately between these devices so I can think of something I want to put in the newsletter while I am away and then add it to the Notes app on my iPhone. . When I get home, it is in the Notes on my desktop. When I am ready to publish, I copy and paste it to Send a Message and use the formatting there to finish it. I have found the formatting available, color, font size, etc, makes a very nice looking and readable newsletter.

After sending a message to the support to look for a fix and not hearing anything back, I decided to experiment. I found if you are copying and pasting from most anything else, such as my personal email messenger, it brings over a bunch of extra unseen formatting which Send a Message promptly dismisses and send out an unformatted block of text.

I copied my text into Notepad in Microsoft which seems to strip the extra formatting down to basic text, then edited it some, and then copied it into the Send a Message feature. That worked much better. I still had to go back and add any hyperlinks in the Send a Message text prior to sending, but the message that was sent out was what I was expecting instead of the ugly block of text. Try it out!

To get to the heart of the problem, What Encoding Set does the "Send a message" support in the message block? UTF-8? UTF-16 BE? UTF-8 BOM?