TextEdit (for Mac) Go to 'Format' and select 'Make Plain Text'.įrom the 'Plain Text Encoding' dropdown choose 'Unicode (UTF-8)'. Knowing you use TextEdit, and knowing that it displays your text correctly, I would try these steps I found online to save as a more normal utf-8 text file from within TextEdit:

If I remember correctly, Text Edit saves things by default as ‘rich text file’ (rtf) format, and makes it less than obvious to save as a more standard text file. I haven’t used TextEdit for a long time, because it pulled some crap like this on me one time. What format did the online converter convert from? And changing the settings in the text editor won’t change the encoding of an individual file, it will change the format it writes to by default, I believe. So I would insert a Run AppleScript action as the first action, which will receive the selected text.Well I would still guess that the file is not actually utf-8, and believe it more since when you “converted” it to utf-8 it came out wrong: you have to know the original encoding (and open the file in that encoding) before you can correctly convert it. The bulk of the Automator workflow will then be scripted, which I predominantly do with AppleScript. So, your Automator service will take selected text, which can be from any application or limited to a specific application of your choice, such as Preview or some other PDF document viewer. When I copy a text from PDF I need to paste it to a word processor Therefore, I'm already limited by what I can assist you with, so I'm going to focus on using another application in this example. I, personally, don't, so I have no idea what Automator actions are supplied with it (if any), nor whether it is AppleScriptable or not. You've mentioned using Scrivener, but implicitly assumed that we all use it too. So the method won't be too far from what you'll need to employ to achieve your outcome. You'll want to read and follow its instructions, which goes through a step-by-step example of how to take some selected text and change it's case to uppercase, or what not. Here's the documentation on how to make a systemwide service using Automator.

Mac os paste as plain text