Copy and pasting in plain text/remove formatting

Brand new user to Agenda, and while I am really enjoying it thus far, I was curious if there was a way to clear formatting from something that was copy and then pasted into an Agenda note. For example, if I need to copy text from another application, it pastes the text into a format that basically looks like everything has a double-space (yet no carriage return). Example:

Text line 1

Text line 2

And there’s not way to get rid of that space between lines. I really just want to be able to clear formatting and put something into simple text, like you can do in Bear/SimpleNote/etc.

Thanks, and again, great product!

Stu

1 Like

Hi Stu,

You can try Edit > Paste and Match Style. That will remove the styles from the text.

If the other editor using using extra spaces between paragraphs, Agenda won’t remove those. One way you could have those removed is to paste into a normal plain text file (eg TextEdit), save with the file extension .md, and then import that into Agenda (File > Import). It will treat the text as markdown, so it will remove those extra lines. (Markdown has extra lines between paragraphs, which is why editors like Bear have them — they are Markdown editors.)

Hope that helps!

Kind regards,
Drew

@drewmccormack I have a similar issue and I think it’s related to this; when I paste something from an email, such as an address from a hotel; Each line-break in the address gets moved over into a separate paragraph with spacing between it.

Is there any easy way to revert this without going through each paragraph break and replacing it with Ctrl-Return?

It might make sense to handle blocks of short lines that are pasted differently from longer texts that are moved over… Not sure it’s that easy, but I hope you understand what the issue is.

Yes, I can understand the issue. It is pretty tricky, of course. We could try to identify short lines and use line breaks instead there, but it will never be perfect. Trying to decide what a “short line” is, for example.

Will think about it. Thanks for the feedback.

1 Like

You can try Edit > Paste and Match Style. That will remove the styles from the text.

If the other editor using using extra spaces between paragraphs, Agenda won’t remove those. One way you could have those removed is to paste into a normal plain text file (eg TextEdit), save with the file extension .md, and then import that into Agenda (File > Import). It will treat the text as markdown, so it will remove those extra lines. (Markdown has extra lines between paragraphs, which is why editors like Bear have them — they are Markdown editors.)

Hi Drew, are there similar workarounds on iOS? I’m struggling with pasting plain text and getting paragraphs between each line as well.

Maik

I think the markdown trick you quote there should work on iOS as well. Ie make a plain text file with .md as extension, and import that. It should collapse the extra paragraphs in that case, because markdown defines an empty line as a paragraph end.

Hi Drew,

I just spent some time trying that. I don’t see how I can “import” files at all on iOS. There’s nothing behind the gear icon in the note, the importing document in the howtos only references Mac menu commands, and I can’t even see something in Siri shortcuts or x-callback-urls to import files, let alone as a md.

Even if that existed, it’s not trivial to create an .md file on iOS. I’d have to find a text editor first that would let me store that somewhere without appending .txt to it, then I have that synced to iCloud unnecessarily, and then I would have to find that file again in Agenda to import it, and then go back to Files and delete it. That’s really not a usable workflow for an often-needed action.

I would be ok with a Siri shortcut that I can trigger on selected text, but Agenda seems to support only “open” and “view” type shortcuts so far.

So, no success here yet.

Maik

I would think you could save a text file to Files app from any text editor, then go into Files and change the extension. Lastly, you would use the action menu (box with arrow) in Files to “Open In…” Agenda. I think that would all work, but you are certainly right it is not ideal.

Tried using a shortcut to save the text into Agenda.md, but the resulting file is named Agenda.txt nevertheless. Renaming it in Files.app results in Agenda.md.txt, so, that failed. And researching/buying a 3rd party text editor app that supports the right shortcuts to make this automatable is too much effort, honestly.

And after renaming the file on the Mac, then opening on Agenda for iOS, I can append it to a project as a new note, but not insert it where I need it. And it even still shows the paragraphs between every line, so I’m just giving up at this point.

Is there a way to copy an URL as is aka raw text also? It’s nice that it can be pasted as is, but I need to also be able to copy it too.

Thanks!

If you copy a link it should place the entire url on the clipboard.

It seems this is still a problem.
I want to copy text from a PowerPoint slide and the formatting from the slide stays with the text regardless how I paste it in (keystroke or menu-based).
Any work-arounds? Other than pasting it first into BBEdit then copying again and pasting it into Agenda? I don’t recall having this problem until the last couple weeks.

Thanks for the follow up, we’ll take a look.

Is the problem that is inserted as an image even?

A quick update to say that this should be fixed in the next update when pasting from Powerpoint.

Version 17.0.1 has just been released with the fix for this.