When I paste text to a NSTextView, how to paste plain text only?

Question

When I paste text to a NSTextView, I wish I can paste plain text only. All the rich text formats should be removed, include: font, color, link, and paragraph style. All the text pasted should be displayed with the default font and style of the text view. NSTextView accepts rich text by default, how to disable it?

Answer 1

Use setRichText: to disable rich text.

Answer 2

Override this method in your NSTextView:

- (NSString *)preferredPasteboardTypeFromArray:(NSArray *)availableTypes restrictedToTypesFromArray:(NSArray *)allowedTypes {
  if ([availableTypes containsObject:NSPasteboardTypeString]) {
    return NSPasteboardTypeString;
  }

  return [super preferredPasteboardTypeFromArray:availableTypes restrictedToTypesFromArray:allowedTypes];
}

For me this worked both for pasting and drag-and-drop.

Answer 3

Define a custom NSTextView class with following method:

- (NSArray *)readablePasteboardTypes {
    return [NSArray arrayWithObjects:NSStringPboardType, 
            nil];
}

Note: As of Mac OS X the new typedef for the pasteboard type is given as NSPasteboardTypeString instead of NSStringPBoardType:

- (NSArray *)readablePasteboardTypes {
    return [NSArray arrayWithObjects:NSPasteboardTypeString,
            nil];
}

Answer 4

The above solutions do resolve the questioner's issue of pasted-in text, but I think that the questioner probably wanted more than that. At least I did when I came here.

I simply want all the characters in my text field to always have the same font, regardless of whether they are inserted programatically, from the nib, pasted in, dragged in, typed in, or dropped in by Santa Claus. I searched Stack Overflow for this broader issue but did not find any questions (or answers).

Instead of the solutions given here, use this idea. In detail, give the text field a delegate which implements this…

- (void)textViewDidChangeSelection:(NSNotification *)note {
    NSTextView* textView = [note object] ;
    [textView setFont:[self fontIWant]] ;
}

Done. This works for all of the edge cases I could think of to test. It's a little weird, to observe a change in the selection for this. Seems like observing the string value of the view's text object, or registering for NSTextDidChangeNotification, would be more logical, but since I already had a delegate set up, and since the above was tested and given the thumbs-up by Nick Zitzmann, I went with it.