ChatGPT markdown formatting issue

Tech Support
1

I’ve noticed inconsistent behavior when copying Markdown-formatted output from the ChatGPT Mac app compared to the web version:

  • When I copy from the web browser, Markdown formatting is preserved across all my apps, including DEVONthink, Drafts, iA Writer, NotePlan, and Craft.
  • But when I copy from the ChatGPT Mac app, formatting only works in some apps (like Craft). In others—like DEVONthink, Drafts (sometimes), iA Writer, and NotePlan—it pastes as plain text with broken formatting. There seem to be extra tab indentations that mess things up.

I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. Is the desktop app copying something other than raw Markdown? Does anyone know a way to consistently get clean Markdown output when copying from the ChatGPT Mac app? Thanks!

2

ChatGPT doesn’t generate proper markdown. I’ve found that it’s mostly good but it stumbles with headers: For example:

## **unnecessary asterisks aren't needed**

I’ve added text to the prompt hoping to stop this and it doesn’t work.

There’s been a more recent update that makes the markdown even less useful. The **boldface asterisks** are getting stripped out.

There’s probably an easy way to fix all this that I’ve missed.

3

True, I’ve noticed that as well. However, if it produces this ouput:

## **unnecessary asterisks aren't needed**

I think a lot of apps that support markdown will display it as if it were:

## unnecessary asterisks aren't needed

Or just to incorporate the actual formatting, like this:

unnecessary asterisks aren’t needed

My problem seems to be that when I paste markdown from ChatGPT (the Mac app) into some apps, it seems that a tab is added before the lines, not allowing any of the pasted text to be rendered as markdown. However, when I copy from the browser based version of ChatGPT, markdown is displayed correctly in any app I paste it into.

4

Gotcha! I’ve only been using the web version so I haven’t run into that.