Prefer HTML pasteboard flavor in rich-text-to-markdown for hyperlinked text fidelity#1033
Conversation
…d text fidelity Modern web sources (browsers, Gmail, Google Docs, Notion, Linear, etc.) place higher-fidelity HTML on the macOS pasteboard than RTF. Hyperlinked text in those sources arrives as real anchor tags in the HTML flavor, which pandoc cleanly renders as [label](url). The RTF flavor from the same sources often drops or mangles those links. The script now tries the HTML flavor first and falls back to the original RTF pipeline when HTML is not present, preserving existing behavior for all sources that only expose RTF.
unnamedd
left a comment
unnamedd
left a comment
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Hi Ali,
Thank you for your contribution to our repository.
I've made only two comments, please check them and re-request a review when you finish addressing them, okay?
| # @raycast.author Adam Zethraeus | ||
| # @raycast.authorURL https://github.com/adam-zethraeus |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
If you are making changes to the Script Command originally created by someone else, it is nice to credit them too, in this case: yourself.
| # @raycast.author Adam Zethraeus | |
| # @raycast.authorURL https://github.com/adam-zethraeus | |
| # @raycast.author Ali Rohde | |
| # @raycast.authorURL https://github.com/alibrohde |
| # Prefer HTML: most modern web sources (browsers, Gmail, Google Docs, Notion, | ||
| # Linear, etc.) place higher-fidelity HTML on the pasteboard than RTF, and it | ||
| # preserves hyperlinked text as real anchor tags that pandoc renders as | ||
| # [label](url) in markdown. | ||
| html=$(osascript -e 'try' -e 'the clipboard as «class HTML»' -e 'on error' -e 'return ""' -e 'end try' 2>/dev/null \ | ||
| | perl -ne 'chomp; next unless s/^«data HTML//; s/»$//; print pack("H*", $_)') |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I am concerned about that because if the editor works with both, and the person prefers to have Markdown instead of RTF, the editor will kind of force the user to make use of RTF. Right?
The case I am thinking of here is Google Docs, where we can have blocks of code and want to paste Markdown inside a code block. I am not sure if it will respect that.
Perhaps it is better to have a second Script Command to convert to RTF instead of doing two things with a single Script Command.
What do you think?
2 participants
Description
Extends
commands/conversions/rich-text-clipboard-to-markdown.shto prefer the HTML pasteboard flavor over the RTF flavor, with the original RTF pipeline kept as a fallback.Why
When you copy hyperlinked text from modern web sources (browsers, Gmail, Google Docs, Notion, Linear, Slack web, etc.), macOS puts both an RTF and an HTML flavor on the pasteboard. The HTML flavor carries the hyperlinks as real anchor tags, which pandoc renders cleanly as
[label](url)in markdown. The RTF flavor from the same sources often drops or mangles those links, leaving the visible text intact but stripping the URL.For anyone who frequently pastes rich text into CLIs or plain-text editors (Claude Code, terminals, vim, etc.), the HTML path meaningfully reduces link loss.
Before / after
Copy from a webpage:
Before (RTF path): hyperlinks often stripped, only visible text survives.
After (HTML path):
```
Check out Raycast and Anthropic.
```
Backward compatibility
No breaking changes. When HTML is absent from the pasteboard (some native apps, older editors), the script falls through to the original RTF pipeline unchanged.
Type of change
Dependencies / Requirements
Unchanged — still only requires
pandoc(brew install pandoc).Checklist