Bullets don't work when pasting text into a ticket

[James Barrett]

I am trying to paste a large block of text into a support ticket I am working on and I need to make it a bullet list. Unfortunately, the formatting in Jira has been screwed up for a few months now such that when I paste that block of text in, Jira can't make it into a bullet list.

Here are the steps to recreate:

1) paste in a block of text

2) Highlight the text

3) Click the bullet icon

I hope you can understand the frustration when I have to paste in a multi-level bullet list of 100 lines or more. Please fix ASAP. This used to work, I don't understand how this made it into production.

Thank you.

[Aaron Dake]

One workaround is to include an extra line in-between the lines you're pasting in.  Then they're added as new paragraphs which can be changed to ordered/unordered lists.

Another option is to paste markdown syntax.  Eg: an asterisk and space (* ) before each line for unordered list, and a decimal with period and space for ordered list.  No need to increment the numbers.

Unordered list markdown:

* item
* item
* item

Ordered list markdown:

1. item one
1. item two
1. item three

[Daniel Verdin]

I was able to get this to work in mac by pasting without format (cmd + shift + v), and then selecting the elements and clicking on the bullet list. It won't work if you start the bullet list and then paste to it.

Ubuntu and Windows should work with ctrl + shift + v. I was only able to test this on Ubuntu and Mac though.

[Sedera Randria]

Hi @James Barrett 

If you have 100+ lines with a special format, why not just attach a specific-formated document to the support ticket? 

[James Barrett]

That's not a solution. Jira used to let me paste in the test and then make it a bullet list, it stopped working after they changed the UI. Spacing isn't right either but that's a different issue.

[Sue Lund]

@James Barrett Did you ever find a solution to this?  
I have the same issue and have not found a solution that wasn't mentioned already. 

• List Item A
  List Item B
  List Item C
  List Item D

[Kurt Dodrill]

.

[Trudy Claspill]

That sort of formatting for bulleted lists happens when there is a Line Feed but not a Carriage Return in the text. If you wanted to intentionally create that type of formatting when typing text into Jira, at the end of your text that follows the bullet you would do Shift-Enter (or Shift-Return) to go to a new line without getting a bullet on that new line.

From what sort of tool are you copying the text? Perhaps the formatting of the data there is the culprit.

[James Barrett]

copying from notepad. Jira used to be able to handle this, I did it all the time, but since they made changes to the UI it hasn't worked.

[James Barrett]

Also, pasting text from Jira into notepad inserts extra empty lines into the test that I then have to delete. So definitely an issue with the Jira UI

[Trudy Claspill]

I'm on a Mac so I don't have Notepad for testing.

The rendering/markup for the memo fields (like Description) did change when the "New Issue View" was implemented. If you have an issue that already exists, you can bring it up in the old view if you want to experiment with the copy/paste. Find the old view option under the ... button (in the upper right corner when viewing an issue) at the bottom of the list - "See the old view"

You can get info on the new view markup here:

https://<your URL>/secure/WikiRendererHelpAction.jspa?section=texteffects

There might be an issue in Atlassian's backlog about this. I haven't found one yet.

[Jacob Stamm]

I'm afraid the Line Feed and Carriage Return explanation is not accurate. I've used both Notepad++ and Visual Studio Code to test copying the list of items, trying LF, CRLF, and just CR, and none of them allow pasting of bulleted lists.

For an example of how it should work, look no further than another web-based Atlassian product, Slack. Creating a bulleted list is trivial and intuitive. Jira's editor is broken and needs to be fixed.