Plugin: Paste from Google Docs w/o losing formatting
I don’t usually share projects publicly, but in order for this plugin to work on mobile it had to be public. And I have found it super useful in just the last 24 hours, so why not share? Yes, I built this with AI. No, I did not write this post with AI. Thank you reading (or not).
I kept running into the same annoying thing pasting from Google Docs into Obsidian — bold/italic/headings/lists/tables all collapsed to plain text wrapped in **. Searched the community plugins, nothing. Eventually found this Obsidian community forum thread explaining the root cause (Google wraps the clipboard HTML in a weird outer <b> tag and uses inline styles instead of semantic markup, which trips up Obsidian's Turndown).
Did some tinkering with Claude Code, ended up with a small plugin that sniffs Google Docs HTML on paste and rewrites it into semantic HTML before handing it off to Obsidian's converter. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, headings (size-based), lists, links (with the google.com/url?q=... redirects unwrapped), and tables all survive. Images can optionally be downloaded into the vault. Non-Google pastes are untouched.
Tested on macOS 15.7.4, 26.1 and iOS 26.4.2 so far. If it doesn’t work for you, turn on Diagnostics > Show clipboard info on paste and post the output on the issues page of the repo so I can take a look.
Obsidian community: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/google-docs-paste
Repo: https://github.com/bfgpollara/obsidian-google-docs-paste
Feedback / issues welcome.