When you paste HTML in Windows Live Writer, the application actually does some clean up (we call it 'thinning') of the HTML. The net effect of this is that most of the formatting is actually removed from the pasted HTML, and it ends up taking on the style of your weblog. This is great for pasting random HTML from the web or other applications, because now you don't have a bunch of mucked up formatting in your post.
There are times, however, when you actually would like a little more control of what gets pasted into Writer. Enter 'Paste Special'...
You can find Paste Special on the Edit Menu, or you can just use Ctrl+Shift+V. Invoking the command opens the Paste Special Dialog, which gives you more control of how you'd like the content pasted. Here is what the dialog looks like when you're pasting HTML
The choices are pretty straightforward and are described in the dialog. I won't try to explain them any better than it does. For those more unusual occasions when you'd like to keep the formatting just like it was when you cut, just choose 'Keep Formatting.'
You may see different choices, of course, depending upon what you are pasting. For example, here's what you get for pasting text from Notepad
Not bad! When you paste text into Writer, we default to assuming it is text and should be displayed just like it looked in the other application. This means that if you paste HTML text from Notepad, here is what is pasted by default
<i>Hello World</i>
Writer is actually HTML encoding the text so that it renders just like it did in Notepad. But if I wanted to actually render the text as HTML, I can just choose HTML from the above dialog, and viola
Hello World
It also comes in handy if you copy and paste HTML code from a website. Rather than switching to source mode and pasting the text, then switching back, just use Paste Special.
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