Thanks for those clues, @WhiteNoise.
I tried pasting in word. It works like every other application I’ve tried other than Obsidian, pasting just the word “Test”.
Interestingly, command-shift-V does indeed just paste the text itself without the added characters.
It might be that Apple Reminders etc are somehow copying the text of the reminder in HTML format…but why would pasting HTML-formatted text cause additional characters to appear in front of the text itself?
I tried creating an empty note and pasting the text into it. It’s definitely just getting six additional spaces and two newlines in front of the word “Test”:
% hexdump test-paste.md
0000000 20 20 20 20 20 20 0a 0a 54 65 73 74
000000c
I’m beginning to suspect that the problem may be with the way Obsidian pastes HTML into a MD document.
#############
Update: I managed to get the same thing happening in text from other applications. I went to TextEdit and created some formatted text there, and copied it. This would, I figure, copy HTML formatted text to the clipboard. I created the following:
This is a test.
This isn’t boldfaced.
I then copied and pasted this text into Obsidian…the boldfacing came across nicely, but once again there were an additional six spaces and two newlines added to the front of the text:
**This is a test.**
This isn't boldfaced.