I’ve been using Drafts for years. Absolutely love it.
However, recently, when copying the content of a draft, which includes paragraph breaks and line breaks… I go to paste the clipboard contents into a separate app… but all of the paragraph breaks have disappeared, and it’s being Pasted as a single long lump of text.
I’m not aware of any changes I’ve made to the Drafts settings, So any help or guidance as to how to maintain the formatting that I’ve created in Drafts would be much appreciated!
I guess a few more specifics would be helpful…
Drafts does not do anything to the text when copying, unless you have an action you are using that intentionally makes changes.
iOS.
Copying by select and copy, as well as copy action.
Seems to only be effecting pastes into the gmail app.
However, clipboard content from other apps are pasting into Gmail with formatting retained.
Currently only seems to be clipboard content from Drafts, that is being pasted into gmail app with formatting lost.
That’s just how the Gmail app handles plain text pasted into it. Drafts is putting the text in the clipboard as it is written. I can reproduce with plain text clipboard content from any source. If you are seeing it behave differently from other sources, they are likely putting some other kind of text in the clipboard (RTF, HTML, etc.) that Gmail handles differently.
Seems like a bug in the Gmail app to my mind, but maybe they have a reason. Maybe a new bug, if you remember it behaving differently before.
If you use a Gmail action that sends the text via URL scheme to the Gmail app, or you use the “Share” action to send the text to Gmail via the system share sheet, it handles it correctly.
Behind the scenes, this likely has to do with Gmail sending as HTML email, and it is not converting the plain text to HTML properly when pasted - and HTML ignores line breaks.
Ok, thanks. That’s interesting!
The send to Gmail options unfortunately won’t meet my use case, as I tend to open a specific email in the app, then draft a response in Drafts before pasting it into my gmail reply.
Is there an action where I would be able to copy draft contents as html / rtf?
Would that be a workaround?
You can use the Copy as HTML action (probably already in your “Markdown” action group).
This puts converts the content from Markdown to HTML and puts it in the clipboard, which seems to work nicely with Gmail, and has the benefit of support all normal Markdown markup (bold, italics, etc.) for formatting.
It does, however, require you to specify line breaks with two spaces at the end of the line - which is a standard Markdown convention.
Same here, following.
Thanks for your inputs.
Should it be helpful I did post an action (or two) that will add in the Markdown new line double spaces in response to another rich text related query.
I have tried to find a solution to this problem on multiple occasions as this is an important workflow for me. I continue to fail. Pasting from Drafts to Gmail through any method (simple copy, copy as rich text, copy as HTML) does not preserve paragraph formatting (pasted text is a single blob).
symlumer’s copy as rich text actions also do not preserve paragraph formatting for me.
If I do a simple copy to clipboard in Drafts, paste into Apple Notes (where formatting is preserved on paste), recopy within Apple Notes, and paste into Gmail, paragraph and other formatting is preserved.
Can you confirm you are adding new lines into Drafts as per the Markdown syntax, as noted by Greg above?
I’m wondering if Gmail might be being strict and Apple Notes lazy - this would explain why going via Notes could work.
Yes, I believe so. After rereading this post I went back into the draft and added two spaces at the end of each line which concludes a paragraph. This does not fix the behavior.
I’ve just spent over an hour on my iPhone testing pasting out of Drafts as rich text into various apps (in a few different ways), pasting from other apps into GMail, and outputting from and via Shortcuts (from Drafts) too. In fact I’m not having much consistency or luck for any email apps (including GMail) when pasting rich text. I can’t even begin to tell what’s going on it seems so inconsistent across the board.
In would be interesting to see if anyone else gets more consistent results.