Paste from MS Word document to a Web Form

Question

What is the most common way people preserve basic formatting elements like bold emphasis and italics when copying to a textarea from an MS Word document. I noticed that Gmail does this well and StackOverflow does not. Are there common frameworks that do this?

Answer 1

Probably one of the most common rich text controls used is FCKEditor (now, thank God, named CKEditor). It does a really great job at preserving format when pasting from Word.