Pasting Plain Text into Apps on iPhone

TidBITS Talk
1

This has been frustrating me for a while. I highlight text say on a webpage which I want to paste into mail. (For example, I look up the spelling of a country in Safari, and I want to paste that into my message.

My go to trick has been pasting it into iA Writer, a markdown app. There it loses its formatting, and I can recopy it and paste it into Mail. Klutzy and clumsy, but I suffered with it.

Then I read that I could select Copy from the shared sheet and the selected text is copied. Nope. It copies the URL.

So, how do you guys handle pasting in plain text into apps on the iPhone? On the Mac, there’s usually a Paste Match Style command. On an iPhone, there is none.

2

Look into using Shortcuts. On a similar vein, I use a shortcut to clean and rewrap recognized text copied from the Camera app.

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3

Okay. Figured it out. Not obvious.

I tried sharing and copying the text. I’d highlight the text, hit the share button, then hit copy. That didn’t work. That copied the item I was looking at and not the highlighted text. It was the URL of a webpage in Safari or the file in Pages.

However, if you highlight text, you get the copy/paste pop up. If you scroll left, you’ll see “share…” in the menu. Click on that. Then click on Copy in the Share Sheet. That copies the text and not the formatting.

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