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Prefer HTML pasteboard flavor in rich-text-to-markdown for hyperlinked text fidelity #1033

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Prefer HTML pasteboard flavor in rich-text-to-markdown for hyperlinked text fidelity #1033

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17 changes: 16 additions & 1 deletion commands/conversions/rich-text-clipboard-to-markdown.sh
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Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
# @raycast.title Rich Text to Markdown
# @raycast.author Adam Zethraeus
# @raycast.authorURL https://github.com/adam-zethraeus
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@unnamedd unnamedd Apr 20, 2026

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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.

Suggested change
# @raycast.author Adam Zethraeus
# @raycast.authorURL https://github.com/adam-zethraeus
# @raycast.author Ali Rohde
# @raycast.authorURL https://github.com/alibrohde

# @raycast.description Convert rich text clipboard data to GitHub Flavored Markdown using Pandoc
# @raycast.description Convert rich text clipboard data (preserving hyperlinked text as [label](url)) to GitHub Flavored Markdown using Pandoc. Tries the HTML pasteboard flavor first, falls back to RTF.
#
# @raycast.icon 📝
#
Expand All @@ -20,4 +20,19 @@ if ! command -v pandoc &> /dev/null; then
fi

export LC_CTYPE=UTF-8

# 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*", $_)')
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@unnamedd unnamedd Apr 20, 2026

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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?


if [ -n "$html" ]; then
printf '%s' "$html" | pandoc --from=html --to=gfm | pbcopy
exit 0
fi

# Fall back to RTF for sources that only expose rich text (some native apps,
# older editors). This is the original behavior of the script.
osascript -e 'the clipboard as «class RTF »' | perl -ne 'print chr foreach unpack("C*",pack("H*",substr($_,11,-3)))' | pandoc --from=rtf --to=gfm | pbcopy