Hey Folks,
Over and over again people need to post structured data strings to the forum and end up pasting them into the forum editor.
Frequently this data is mangled by the Discourse software whilst rendering it, and the rendered data is not conveniently available to people who would test with it.
So, what's the answer?
Use a Keyboard Maestro Set Variable to Text action to transmit the data – better yet provide a simplest possible test-case macro that contains one in the appropriate context.
Here's a sample that contains a line of spaces and a line of non-breaking-spaces – these would NOT render well on the forum...
Post Unusual Data String on the Forum v1.00.kmmacros (7.3 KB)
** Note – the display text action has delimiter character at the beginning and end of the string:
“¦”
Without a delimiter the action would automatically trim whitespace (a function I firmly believe should be optional but isn't).
I wish we had an action that would set the clipboard to styled-text data, but we don't so far. It can be done via a named-clipboard, but then you have to transmit the data for said clipboard – and the end user has to create one to use the data, and then copy the data into it. A highly inconvenient workflow for testing. @peternlewis?
For now I'm using a Comment action to allow styled-text data to be added to the macro. The user has to manually copy that to the clipboard, but c'est la vie.
-Chris