[pupppet]

It's tough because you don't want the formatting...until you. If I'm editing text that has a few bolded words I'd be immediately annoyed if the pasted text didn't have the bolded instances.

[Willamin]

Great point!

I'd then suggest that formatting that always conveys meaning (bold, italics, etc) should be copy/pasted.

On the other hand, formatting that often doesn't convey meaning (font face, foreground color, background color, shadows, etc) should not be copied by default.

A three-way option to system-wide (and per application) configure the behavior for control/command + x/c/v would be nice:

    * smart copy/paste (what I just described) as the default
    * copy/paste as plain text
    * copy/paste with full formatting

[stevesimmons]

> font face

Except where you're copying math and all your Greek alphas change to a.

Your smart copy/paste would be great if it is smart enough to infer the right options from context, and update from my subsequent adjustments.

[xigoi]

Why would you use a different font for Greek letters???

[aendruk]

The smart thing to do would be to convert it to α. (Or type that in the first place?)

[pupppet]

Yep totally agree. The number of times I've pasted into a WYSIWYG editor and discovered a mess of nested divs that came along for the ride...