Copy and pasting from Illustrator to other programs

[danej48183859]

I can't copy and paste an image made in illustrator to any other program.  I use illustrator to combine microscope images into figures then move those figures to other programs like word, prism or powerpoint.  I just received the CC version of illustrator and when I Copy and paste to Word I get a long text string, and Prism just gives me a memory error message.  Any possible answers to why this is happening and what I can do to fix it. Cheers

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

Try and uncheck the SVG-Code option in Preferences > File Handling and Clipboard.

[danej48183859]

That worked to let me copy and paste to Powerpoint.  I still get the Disk/memory error when trying to paste into prism.

[Monika Gause]

danej48183859  schrieb

I still get the Disk/memory error when trying to paste into prism.

Then you might want to contact the Prism folks about it.

[danej48183859]

Thanks, I have and they don’t have a fix either.

Cheers, Dane

[Monika Gause]

You could try and experiment with the other 2 settings: PDF and AICB (which is the old Illustrator clipboard format. Maybe it's more compatible with the other app?

[danej48183859]

I have already tried altering those settings with no luck.

[cyclopsdx]

This workaround has not worked for me. I am having to copy from Illustrator and paste into InDesign, then copy from InDesign and paste into Mail. Why is this copy/paste problem still an issue when the problem was posted over a year ago? This appears to have been an issue for me since the last CC update. Why are there always, always problems with CC updates? I'm paying my subscription for you to add to my user experience, not break the things that are already there. 

[Monika Gause]

Copying and pasting as SVG has added a lot of user experience for a lot of people.

What exactly are you copying from Illustrator to InDesign and then to Mail and what exactly does not work where exactly?

You know that you can't expect Illustrator to copy something correctly for an application that has been made by a different developer and that Illustrator doesn't even know of?

[cyclopsdx]

I'm trying to select a paragraph of text from my Illustrator artwork and paste it into Apple Mail so that a client can review it to make sure it reads correctly, as I have been doing in my workflow for the last 15+ years. When I paste it into Mail it appears as though it's coming in as an image rather than editable text (as it used to), so I'm assuming it's pasting as SVG or PDF? I've now switched those options off in Preferences>File Handling as the workaround on this thread suggests but it's still pasting as an image and not text that the client can adjust and mail back to me if it's incorrect. Something has changed, so it's not as if I'm expecting it to do anything different to what I am used to and what the application did before. What's changed?

[Monika Gause]

That's simple: Mail does what you tell it to do. You have set it to Compose e mails as "formatted text" and then it tries just that when you paste something into it.

Go into Mail > Preferences and then into the "Composition" tab (or whatever that is called in English, it has this writing icon) and then set it to Text only. Then Create a new e-mail and paste your text.

[cyclopsdx]

Thanks for the information. That appears to work but it only works if Preferences>Composing is set to Plain Text as default - you can't convert individual files from Rich Text to Plain Text when you are already working in a Rich Text mail draft, which is the way I used to be able to work. Strange that you can still work in this way using InDesign. Something has definitely changed but at least I can still copy/paste from Illustrator. Thanks for the heads up.

[calvinki]

I have the same porblem. The text I copied from Illustrator can't not be paste as file name. It can't be paste in other apps such as InDesign, Mail, Safari, etc as live text. It oly started happening in the past fewe days. Tried all the "fixes", nothing really help excepts the "Export Text as..." buty it is crazy to do all tghat just to paste some text. Please fix this Adobe!  thx

[Monika Gause]

calvinki  schrieb

Please fix this Adobe!  thx

Please post bugs over there: http://illustrator.uservoice.com

Nobody will see it here.

[jameskennedy1]

As a workaround, I copy and paste from illustrator into indesign and then into whatever application (outlook usually). Indesign seems to strip all the extras and retain it as text.

[owenl10033421]

Thank you very much, there are a ton of complicated answers on here that didn't even work for me but this solved in instantly!

[SJRiegel]

When pasting into Outlook, Paste and Match Style works to paste text as text from Illustrator. It turns out that this trick sadly does not work wtih Mail.

[cyclopsdx]

It used to work in Mail by copying/pasting in Rich Text and it would import in with the same font & size settings as Illustrator and simply using the keyboard command would switch to Plain Text so that all font/size were consistent. Now it seems that I have to keep my default on Plain Text (causing problems with custom signatures I use) and switch to Rich Text once pasted, which is the exact opposite to how I use to operate my workflow until a few weeks ago. Again, InDesign seems to be ok but something has now changed with Illustrator. Hmmm....

[Monika Gause]

"Few weeks ago"

Possibly not. I just tried in CC2017 and it didn't work. Whatever you did, you probably didn't paste text objects from Illustrator into Apple Mail.

[cyclopsdx]

It's not pasting into TextEdit or Word, either. I'm getting picture/image blocks instead of text or complete blanks when I convert to Plain Text. I had to open InDesign, repaste the entire text from Illustrator into ID, then paste into Word. File Handling & Clipboard SVG-Code option are both unchecked.  This is supposed to be a better user experience?

[Monika Gause]

I don't see an issue pasting a text object into TextEdit and getting text.

TextEdit has to set to "Text". You can do that in the TextEdit settings or by pressing Cmd+Shift+T with an open document. The shortcut changes from formatted text to just text.

When copying a tet object in Illustrator, Illustrator doesn't know what you want to do with it. Maybe you want to paste it into another AI document. And then it would be conveniert to have the formatted text object, because most probably you want to have it that way. So what you actually need in the other application is an option to paste unformatted text.

[TCPrakash]

Thanks, that worked, but I also had to right click and chose "Keep text only" from the context menu options in Word.