What Relic remembers
Copy a paragraph out of a web page or a document and it usually carries more than the words. Relic keeps that alongside the text: bold, italic, links, bullet lists, numbered lists, headings, tables and alignment all survive the trip.
The plain words are kept too, and they are the version that matters. Relic searches the plain text, shows the plain text in the list, and can always fall back to it. Formatting is a bonus riding along with the item, and losing it never makes the item wrong.
Turn it off and Relic keeps only the words. Items you captured before keep what they already have.
What comes back out
When you paste, the formatting comes with it, but the look of the source does not. Relic strips the colours, the background colours, the font and the size on the way out. Bold stays bold and a link stays a link, and they take on the look of the document you are pasting into.
There is a good reason for that. Three sentences copied off a dark web page carry "white text" and "black background" on every word. Paste that into a white document three weeks later and you get white text in black boxes. Stripping the skin means a paste always looks like the page it lands on.
Off, everything pastes as plain text, everywhere, no matter what Relic remembered. Some people want this permanently, and it is one switch.
Plain text, just this once
For a single paste, leave the setting alone and use the row menu instead. Right-click a row, open Copy as, and pick Plain text. The same submenu also converts the case for you.
Three more things:
- Secrets never carry formatting. An API key or a card number is stored as plain text and nothing else. See Secrets.
- Very heavy formatting is trimmed. A page can carry tens of kilobytes of styling for a single sentence. Relic caps what it keeps, and drops the word processor flavour first because the web one works in more places.
- Editing the text drops the formatting. Change the words in the editor and the old styling no longer matches them, so Relic lets it go rather than pasting something that has drifted away from what you see.
On a phone
Phones keep formatting too, with one difference. Android keeps the web flavour only. An iPhone or an iPad keeps both the web flavour and the word processor one, so a paste into Pages or Word keeps more of what you copied.
The switch on a phone is a single row that covers both keeping and pasting:
See Settings on your phone for the rest of the sheet.