I would agree with those that would find it useful for Drafts to automatically paste rich text as markdown. That would make for a very natural expected result.
Formatting would be nice, but links are what would be especially important and valuable to preserve.
This would be a way for Drafts to set itself further apart from any other text editor. With support for rich text-to-markdown import/paste capability, it would then also be a more thorough markdown editor.
Yes, Drafts can theoretically edit markdown as text now, but if it can’t take markdown output as input, then it’s not a comprehensive markdown editor yet.
That’s an additional feature. It isn’t related to thoroughness.
That isn’t theoretical. Markdown is plain text. drafts can edit plain text. It also supports syntax highlighting for Markdown.
It can take Markdown as input because Markdown is plain text. I think what you mean is that it does not default to accepting and transforming rich text when available.
Yes, this would extend the feature set, but as you noted this would be a differentiator, so your point seems to be nothing out there is comprehensive.
While it would be nice to have such a feature built in, today we have Shortcuts on the Mac. It is trivial to create a shortcut that takes rich text (file, clipboard, share sheet, etc.), converts it to (plain text) Markdown, and creates a new draft from that result.
Here’s an example that does it for the clipboard.
Things have moved on in the last couple of years, since this topic was last active, and Drafts’ shortcuts support, along with the addition of Shortcuts to macOS now provides the functionality through a more classical automation approach - which allows you to further customise it for the needs of your own workflow.
I can’t argue for Drafts being “comprehensive”. I feel that’s a loaded term as it is not strictly defined as to what that encompasses. However, I can argue the case that the flexibility and range of functionality does lend itself to being able to be tailored to meet most needs.
Thank you for the reply.
Yes, I meant handling rendered markdown, not just the plain text of markdown.
I was 5 aware Apple had built markdown support I to Shortcuts.
I tried making a shortcut using the Make Markdown option. It’s not currently working in iPadOS 16 Public Beta 4.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/6a5428abc8a64c25b3ecc6a44ada2ea0
I turned off some input types because I was trying to force it to recognize a hyperlink in the text. Didn’t work. Beta.
Thank you
Tim
16,512 days
FWIW, I tested it on iOS 15.6.1 and it seems to work okay on that OS.
