I'm looking at a thread from four years ago:
Paste Without Formatting, But With Link
It seems to work for others but I am having trouble getting a styled clipboard to work in my particular macro. My context is that I am copying a list of links, sometimes more than 20, in a single โC copy action. It seems as if, when I copy the current System Clipboard to the Temporary clipboard in order to get a blank line and a line with the date at the top, then style the Temporary clipboard, what gets pasted is the text version, the titles with the URL following in parentheses.
Here's the original System Clipboard, pasted into a new TextEdit document:
And here's the styled Temporary Clipboard, pasted into the target document, with the font and colors set:
At some point, within those two actions above, the formatted text got converted to plain text. I doubt that it's in the Apply Style action.
My supposition is that somehow, using `%SystemClipboard% in the definition of the Temporary Clipboard, the clipboard contents got converted to plain text before being saved as styled text. I have the "styled text" option selected in the "Set Clipboard" action.
Am I doing something wrong? How else can I prepend text to a styled clipboard and keep the styling, i.e. keep the URL hidden in the formatted text link?
The only thing I've come up with is to open a temporary TextEdit file, paste the clipboard, move to the top, insert the blank line and date, and copy the TextEdit contents.
That's an awful kludge, slow and opening extra app windows, in a macro that I would like to be relatively silent, just archiving the current tabs with a date while I quickly get back to what I was doing.