Pasting formatted text in Messages and Markdown in Notes

I was particularly excited about Apple’s decision to support Markdown in Notes. They also showed that pasting formatted text into Messages would now work, which gave me a great opportunity to test how well they’ve integrated Markdown. In the current developer beta on my iPad Mini 6, the results for this feature are disappointing.

I could indeed copy and paste a bit of formatted text within Messages from one conversation to another, and it retained its formatting. Pasting the message into Notes, or copying anything from Notes into a Message, removed all formatting. I hope this is a bug, and not intended behaviour.

The second feature I was excited to test was Markdown support in Notes, and finding out if this meant that Apple was adopting Markdown in more places. Simply typing Markdown in Notes doesn’t work. That is to say, Notes just showed the special characters, instead of interpreting them to format the text. Copying formatted text from Notes and pasting into text editors with Markdown support resulted in plain text without any formatting.

Exporting as Markdown from Notes works—partially.¹ From the share menu, I selected “Export as Markdown”. Notes popped up a little export-progress bar, then a second share-sheet, giving me some option on what to do with the generated Markdown. Copying didn’t work, it seemed the clipboard was empty after copying, but saving to files saved a directory containing a Markdown file. Now, this is interesting! Notes exporting a Note into a directory makes sense. Markdown supports linking to images natively² and a Markdown file is a plain text file. To ensure the images you add to a note don’t get lost when exporting, Apple has to generate a directory with the Markdown file and all images you added to that note.

It looks like Apple isn’t using Markdown to store the formatting of text in Notes, but considers it a third-party format to be exported to. Whether that means they’ll add the ability to import Markdown is unclear, but my hopes of simply copy-pasting from and to Notes in Markdown were probably misplaced.