rtf notes become double spaced when copied to gmail

DEVONthink Tips
1

I frequently draft an email in an rtf note in devonThink and then copy and paste it into gmail - however it becomes double spaced when it pastes and I have to select everything and remove all formatting, and then go through manually and remove the blank lines. I’m not sure why this happens. Is there a way around this? It is single spaced in the original rtf document.

I also notice that in rtf notes, sometimes it suddenly goes into a double space mode and I’m not sure why and can’t stop it unless I go to spacing and change all of the settings. Is there a way to prevent/control this? It may be happening because of the formatting of something I paste into the note - is there a way to paste without formatting?

Thanks in advance.

2

Command-Option-Shift-V will paste without formatting.

3

Actually, that command is “Paste and Match Style” – which means use the formatting defined at the insertion point in Mail and not the formatting of the Rich Text on the clipboard.

4

…or another Rich Text enabled environment, like TextEdit or in DEVONthink. (Thanks for the clarification. He might have been looking for NO formatting at all. >> I actually use this option a ton.))

5

I’d use it more often if I changed its shortcut to something simpler.

6

Thank you all for the previous replies. Pasting the unformatted text worked well for a while, but now I am composing long lists with boldface, italics, and web links in DT RTF notes. I frequently want to paste those into a gmail message, and regardless of the spacing in the RTF file, it forces the text to have a space between each paragraph in gmail. I cannot delete the spaces. The only way to get rid of them is to remove the formatting from all of the text in gmail and remove the spaces between the paragraphs one by one. As you pointed out, I can also use shift-cmd-V to get the same result. However, in both cases I lose all of my applied bold, italics, web links etc.

Does anyone know why I can’t paste exactly what I see in the rtf note into gmail (i.e. without forcing a space between each paragraph when there was no space in the original rtf file in DT)? Is there any option to avoid adding the double spacing, but preserve my rtf formatting (bold, web links etc)?

Thanks in advance.

7

The formatting problem is due to the way OS X translates rich text line breaks and other formatting into HTML – Gmail’s web interface is HTML, of course. The sort-of-easiest work around is to compose in DEVONthink using RTF, because the interface for RTF is better at recognizing keyboard commands such as command-b, command-i, and so forth. Then convert the RTF note to a formatted note (HTML based), and copy/paste that into your Gmail compose box in your browser. Unfortunately, this isn’t perfect – you will still lose some formatting in lists.

For a perfect copy, use Nisus Writer or Mellel (and other 3rd party rich text editors) because they do not use the OSX rich text infrastructure and do a better job with copy/paste to HTML.