Smart paste

Hints an tips

Important: to be successful, the start of your pasted block should contain the highest level provision in your copied block of text e.g. if you have copied a section, followed by a cross heading: smart paste will not paste the following cross heading. 

To get around the issue, you either need to make sure the start of your copied block of text includes the highest level provision i.e. Cross heading, followed by a section, followed by a cross heading.

If you are copying data in chunks due to other smart paste limitations, consider manually adding the higher levels in later e.g. pasting only section level and using "Wrap element" to later insert the higher grouping level elements such as part, chapter and cross headings etc. 

Smart paste has been designed to work for the following scenarios:

Copying the body of a Bill/Act (including schedules)

Copying the body of an SI.  Note: smart paste cannot handle signatures yet, so to copy an existing SI/SSI, it is best to copy the body first and the schedules as a separate copy & paste operation.

Copying schedules

Copying quoted structures/amending text (nested quoted structures are also handled)

Copying portions of a document e.g. a part containing multiple sections, a list of subsections etc.

Copying individual amendment instructions (including any quoted structures) 

Scenarios not currently handled:

Signatures in SI/SSIs

Tables and images

Explanatory Statements in UK amendments

Proposer/Supporters in amendments

Multiple definitions on the same line e.g. “condition A”, “condition B”, “condition C”, “condition D” or “condition E” means that condition as set out in section 3;"

Front and Back covers & the preface (Enacting words etc.)

Footnotes in SIs (need to insert them manually into the Editor but at least you can copy and paste the text for each footnote from the source.  Sometimes they can trip up smart paste as they render as the same number format as paragraphs.  If paste is tripping up over the footnotes, the best thing is to paste the text into a Word document or notepad and remove the footnote references)

“Schedules” heading (appears before Schedules in UK bills and SIs in certain circumstances)

Known limitations:

If copying text from a website, be aware that websites can handle line breaks/carriage returns in inconsistent ways which can confuse smart paste.  For example, we've noticed that legislation.gov can sometimes miss carriage returns, particularly before closing words which will result in the closing words being added as text to the end of the provision before it or after definitions in SIs.  This is why it's really important to check what you have pasted into the Editor whenever you use smart paste.  

If copying from a PDF, there can often be carriage returns added to the end of lines in the copied text which will confuse smart paste.  

When copying from Legislation.gov.uk:

SI definitions: for some reason, there is no line break after a definition copied from legislation.gov (even though you can see one in the webpage rendering) so the easiest way around this is to paste a chunk of definitions (e.g. the Paragraph they sit within) into a Word document or notepad and manually insert line breaks (carriage return) after each definition.  Copy from the notepad and paste into Lawmaker in the appropriate location in your document.

Schedules when copied from Legislation.gov.uk:

In a UK bill the reference note appears before the schedule num which confuses smart paste.  The easiest way around this issue is to paste the content of the schedule into a Word document or notepad and move the reference note from the start, to after the schedule number e.g.

Schedule 1 Section 2

Terrorism prevention and investigation measures

In Scottish bills, the reference note appears after the schedule heading.  The easiest way around this issue is to paste the content of the schedule into a Word document or notepad and move the reference note from after the schedule heading, to before the schedule heading so that it appears correctly between the schedule number and the heading e.g.

SCHEDULE 1

(introduced by section 1)

The Scottish Pubs Code

Other tips when a paste doesn't go to plan:

If using a PDF, it can sometimes help to export the PDF into a Word Document (File > Export to > Microsoft Word) and copy from the Word document

If text from a provision has been included in the preceding provision, this can be usually be corrected in Lawmaker by using the 'Split' function and, if needed, 'Promote Element' or 'Demote Element' to convert the sibling provision into the appropriate provision.

If smart paste cannot work out a structure, it will paste the text as plain text, sometimes in the last provision it could recognise.  If this happens to you and 'split' is not going to work or will take too long to sort out the block of text, then it might be easier to select a smaller chunk of text to copy and paste as separate actions.  

Smart paste is as good as the data that it using to convert from.  Therefore it may be necessary to tweak the text in the source document e.g. to make sure you remove additional carriage returns or to ensure numbered provisions do actually have a number in the correct format

Check that the document you are copying doesn’t include line numbers as that will confuse smart paste

Smart paste can be further improved and the best way to ensure this is to let us know where a paste hasn’t worked as expected.  Send the source document to the support email address (if you are allowed) so that we can investigate where the issue lies and how we might be able to improve smart paste to handle that particular scenario.