Formats — Klippster docs

#The eight

Format	Extension	What it produces
Markdown	`.md`	Structure detected with Apple's `swift-markdown` — real parsing, not a regular-expression guess.
PDF	`.pdf`	Markdown rendered as a laid-out document. Fonts and colours are styleable.
PNG	`.png`	Clipboard images written straight to an image file.
Rich Text	`.rtf`	Keeps bold, italics and styling from rich-text sources.
HTML	`.html`	Web content saved as HTML, or down-converted to text or Markdown.
Plain Text	`.txt`	The universal fallback. Clean, unstyled, compatible with everything.
SVG	`.svg`	Vector clipboard data preserved as scalable SVG rather than rasterised.
Web Location	`.webloc`	A URL as a double-clickable macOS location file.

All eight are in the free version, in both directions, with no watermark and no limit.

#Markdown becomes a real PDF

This is the conversion most tools get wrong, so it is worth being specific about. Exporting Markdown to PDF elsewhere usually means printing a plain-text file: you get the # characters and the * characters rendered literally, in a monospace font, on a page.

Klippster parses the Markdown first and typesets the result. Headings are set as headings, lists are indented and bulleted, bold is bold, code is set in a monospace face with its own background, and links are live.

mdon the clipboard

# Launch notes

**Ship date:** 14 March

- Format packs signed end to end
- History capped at 200 clips

Run `npm run validate:release` before tagging.

…comes out as a document with a 24-point heading, a bulleted list, a bold run inside a paragraph, and npm run validate:release set in monospace — not as eight lines of literal punctuation.

The fonts and colours used for that rendering are configurable, and a Format Pack can replace the renderer entirely with a pandoc or LaTeX template if you want your own house style.

#Image formats

The eight above are the conversion formats. The Prepare Image editor exports a wider set, because choosing an image format is a size-and-quality decision rather than a structural one:

PNG JPEG HEIC WebP

Each is encoded at its real size before you choose, so the number you are comparing is the number you get rather than an estimate.

Some conversions want an external tool

A few outputs are produced by optional command-line tools rather than by macOS itself — WebP needs cwebp or ImageMagick, and some document conversions use pandoc or a PDF engine. Klippster locates them if they are installed and degrades gracefully if they are not, so a format that depends on a missing tool simply is not offered. Nothing breaks; the option is absent.

#How the offered list is built

Klippster never shows a format that cannot represent what you have. For a paste, it inspects the clipboard; for a file, it inspects the file's type. The consequence is that the menu is shorter than the list above, every time — an image offers PNG and nothing else, because there is no sensible Markdown rendering of a screenshot.

Which pairs are available for file-to-file conversion depends on the type on both ends; the Convert to submenu shows exactly the ones defined for that file, and appears dimmed when there are none. Paste, copy, convert covers the three surfaces this list appears on.

#Adding more

Eight is where the built-ins stop, deliberately — every format in that table is one somebody has to keep working across macOS releases. Anything beyond it is a Format Pack: a small sandboxed WebAssembly converter that adds its formats to the shortcuts, the app and every Finder menu at once.