Formats

#The eight

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.

# 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. Images reach further in both directions:

• Pasting an image offers every format your Mac can create — PNG, JPEG, HEIC, AVIF, TIFF, GIF, BMP — not just PNG.
• The Prepare Image editor exports PNG, JPEG, HEIC and WebP, because choosing an export format is a size-and-quality decision rather than a structural one. 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

Klippster works out of the box. A few free command-line tools, if you install them, unlock extra conversions — you never need them, and Klippster just offers fewer options without them. A format that depends on a missing tool simply is not offered; nothing breaks, the option is absent.

• HTML & Rich Text files → Markdown / Plain Text need pandoc (brew install pandoc). Rich Text → PDF additionally needs a PDF engine such as Tectonic (brew install tectonic).
• HTML → PDF needs nothing extra — Klippster renders the page itself, keeping its real design (colours, layout, images, fonts), so it looks like the page does in a browser. Web pages convert to one continuous page by default. For anything else, pick Convert to ▸ PDF (page setup)… in the Finder menu: it opens a window with a live preview where you can set the page size, orientation, margins, scale, and two things worth knowing about:
  • Layout — "Fit page width" lets the page adapt to the paper the way it would adapt to a narrow browser window (so a desktop design may switch to its mobile layout). "Desktop (1180 px)" keeps the design as authored and shrinks it to fit instead.
  • Background — "Match page" puts the page's own colour across the whole sheet, "White sheet" prints it on white paper, and "Ink saving" also drops background colours and darkens the text, so a dark page prints readably instead of as white-on-white.
• WebP images: your Mac can read WebP but not create it, so Klippster brings its own encoder — cwebp, the reference tool from Google's libwebp, included in the app. There is nothing to install, and WebP is offered alongside PNG, JPEG and HEIC out of the box. If you would rather not see it, switch it off under K → Settings… like any other format. Every other image format (PNG, JPEG, HEIC, AVIF, TIFF, GIF, BMP) works with no extra tools either.

You can see what's detected in K → Settings… → Advanced.

#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 image formats 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.