If I select some content on a website and I paste it into a draft, I only get plain text, losing any links that the original content might have had. Is there a way of pasting content in Drafts so that I get those links converted into markdown syntax? Or do I need to perform that conversion outside of Drafts?
I would also be interested in hearing from everyone if you have any generic tips on capturing content from websites.
Take look at the share sheet options for Safari.
Hm, none of those options seem to affect the selected text and I always end up with just plain text in my draft. Am I missing something?
You might also want to investigate doing this via Shortcuts. It’s definitely possible there to take a selection from a Safari web page, convert it from HTML to Markdown and then create a new draft with the contents.
For the share capture options to work, you need to:
Thanks for the suggestions. Here’s where I am right now.
My settings (Markdown is selected, not sure if it is supposed to make a difference):
Selected some text in Safari, including a link, then proceed to the share sheet and select Drafts:
The link didn’t make it into the draft:
Maybe it is unreasonable for me to expect that Draft does this? In that case I will follow what @pdavisonreiber suggested.
Here’s a shortcut that does this, for what it’s worth. Has to be triggered from the share button in the Safari toolbar. It won’t work if you just hit the share button on the text selection.
Okay, from the example you provided I get your original suggestion more clearly now - I’d misread it as you wanting to get the link to the page. Safari only shares the plain text to Drafts (Drafts is a plain text only app), so any rich content in that text such as formatting or hyperlinks wouldn’t be passed across. Apologies for misleading you on that one.
As Peter noted, you would have to convert the rich content (the rendered HTML) to Markdown (a plain text format) prior to inserting it into Drafts. Round tripping through Shortcuts is probably the ideal option on iOS/iPadOS given the integrations that exist, but on macOS you would need to use a different solution as Shortcuts isn’t available on that platform currently. Though on the plus side there are a variety of tools that could help you with this. This is something where there probably isn’t a neat multi-platform solution.
Ah, gotcha. I hadn’t realized that Safari only shares plain text in the first place. In that case I will do the conversion somewhere else. Originally I had macOS in mind, but eventually I also want to solve this on iOS, so your suggestions are very welcome. On the mac I will probably just use a LaunchBar action or something similar, should be straightforward enough. Thanks!
