md-to-clipboard

Markdown to Rich Text Clipboard

Copies Markdown as Teams-compatible rich text to the macOS clipboard using md2clip.

Prerequisites

• macOS
• pandoc installed (brew install pandoc)
• md2clip on PATH (ships with this plugin — run the symlink command from the README)

Workflow

1. Get the Markdown content. Either:

   • The user points to an existing .md file, OR
   • Write the content to a temp file: /tmp/claude-{session_name}/clipboard-export.md

2. Run md2clip:

   md2clip /tmp/claude-{session_name}/clipboard-export.md
   

   The script handles all sanitisation, HTML conversion, post-processing, and clipboard copy.

3. Tell the user the rich text is on their clipboard and ready to paste.

What md2clip handles internally

• Sanitises Unicode punctuation (em dashes, smart quotes)
• Converts Markdown to HTML via pandoc (--ascii)
• Joins pandoc's line-wrapped paragraphs onto single lines
• Strips <p> tags (Teams ignores paragraph margins)
• Inserts blank lines between paragraphs for single-line-gap spacing
• Simplifies pandoc code block wrappers to plain <code>
• Removes excessive gaps around lists
• Copies HTML to clipboard via JXA/NSPasteboard

Teams HTML Compatibility Reference

Teams' HTML sanitiser is aggressive. It keeps:

Element	Renders as
<code>	Monospace font + grey background
<ul>/<li>	Bullet list
<ol>/<li>	Numbered list
<strong>	Bold
<em>	Italic
<br>	Line break (full line height, minimum enforced)
<a href>	Clickable link
<table>	Rendered table with borders

Teams strips or ignores: <p> margins, style attributes, <pre>, <div>, CSS margin/padding.

Paragraph Spacing

Blank lines in the HTML source produce single-line gaps in Teams. This is the correct approach. Avoid <span style="font-size:1px"><br></span> — Teams enforces minimum line height on any <br>, producing double-height gaps regardless of the font-size hack.