Lost line breaks when copy/pasting checkboxes as plain text

Something seems to have changed in how check box text is copied into the clipboard (Windows 10) and somehow line breaks are no longer preserved when converting to plain text. This is a minor thing, but it was an oddly important part of keeping my workflow smooth for meeting notes.

We use checkboxes for meeting agenda items, so we can check them off when we’re done discussing each one. We also take notes in a separate section below, with each agenda item as an H3. So we’ll usually create a set of checkbox items above through the week as we’re adding to our agenda, then at the end right before the actual meeting I copy all the agenda item titles at once, and paste plain text in the Notes section below using Ctrl-Shift-V (right-click and “paste as plain text” does the same thing).

Previously what I would get is a nice set of unformatted agenda titles, each on their own line. I.e. they had line breaks, like this:

1031 Update
Apartments, bank account
Donations: Central Valley Fund
Update on investments
Final LOI for 15.5 acres

I could then easily select them all and turn them into H3 all at once.

Now they all just run together, like this:

1031 UpdateApartments, bank accountDonations: Central Valley FundUpdate on investmentsFinal LOI for 15.5 acres

So I have to manually create line breaks. Simply transforming from checkbox into H3 is also not possible (although I would say that’s another issue to address, actually).

I realize there may be better/more sophisticated ways of handling agendas, notes, etc. but this has been my process for quite some time now. And in general I do think that including/preserving line breaks in any kind of list is beneficial, even when converted to plain text. I note that list format is preserved when pasting with formatting (including here in Discourse), but I don’t want a list, just the text with newlines, which also used to work

It’s also possible this is something on my end, though I don’t know why that would happen as I’m doing the same thing as 1 week ago and nothing I can think of has changed in my system setup.

If you Cut/Copy a Checklist in a Rich Text field, then paste-as-plain-text, all the lines are concatenated into a single line.

Also after cutting/copying a regular paragraph that contains “soft line breaks” (Shift-ENTER), and pasting it as plain text, the soft line breaks are ignored and a single line is pasted. I would have expected soft line breaks to get translated into real line breaks, instead of ignored.

Took me a moment to find it because I called it “check list” rather than “checklist”, which is possibly why you also didn’t find it. But I did previously report the line breaks issue here:

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