Dear community,
Hope you all are well. I have a (silly) question on drag and drop to paste content as plain text. Please am I missing some tricks?
What I did:
Drag and drop an annotation (with comments) in the built-in PDF reader of Zotero to a Agenda note
What happened:
The annotation and comments got pasted but the markdown links were lost.
What I expected:
Annotations and comments be copied over with markdown links to the Zotero item and annotations.
Things that might be helpful to know (Agenda version, OS and model, etc): Agenda, Zotero and macOS, all the newest version/update.
Also useful to note is that I can Command+C to copy the annotations to my system clipboard and Paste As Plain Text to preserve the markdown links.
So is there anyway I could drag and drop to paste as plain text? I have appended a screenshot to showcase the problem.
When you say Markdown Links, what exactly are they? Are they normal links in the PDF? Or are they text in markdown format in the PDF?
Also, if you do this in another editor (eg Apple Notes), does it properly work? The reason I ask is that the PDF editor is what puts the information on the clipboard/pasteboard, and so it may not be the same with a drag as with copy/paste. It may not be up to Agenda here. But if it works in other apps, it should be possible to make it work in Agenda.
Many thanks @drewmccormack for your quick reply, sorry for the confusion. I attached a screenshot in my original post. The markdown links are those link back to the Zotero item and annotations as shown in my screenshot in the form of:
“The condition affects all ethnicities and both sexes.” ([Santodomingo-Rubido et al., 2022, p. 18](zotero://select/library/items/3NW6SJ54)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/UA7W83WA?page=18&annotation=B8EHFCW6))
I think the the editor does put the above content on the clipboard while dragging but when I drop in Agenda note, Agenda applies some sort of formatting while pasting. If I instead use Command + C to copy the annotations and choose Edit->Paste As->Plain Text (or Paste and Match Style) rather than the default pasting option, I got the links well preserved. This is the same with Apple Notes, i.e. 1) drag and drop loses links but 2) paste as plain text preserves the links. However in Sublime Text, both approaches behave the same, with links preserved.
Very likely when dragging Zotero pastes a rich text version on the pasteboard which we will always prefer over plain text (with Copy/Paste you explicitly override this behaviour by selecting Paste and Match Style for example). Unfortunately there currently is no way to override this and force a drag-and-drop to pick the plain text representation I’m afraid.
Thanks Alex @mekentosj for clarifying, appreciate it!
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