As of yesterday, May 1, 2026, ‘paste and match style’ results in one large block of text when copy/pasting from Gemini, the Google AI. Each new paragraph starts immediately after the period of the last sentence in the previous paragraph.Like this without any invisibles either. Command-V does the same thing. It does the same in TextEdit, but recognizes paragraphs in Pages. Is there a setting in Scrivener I can change to have it recognize the paragraph breaks in the text from Gemini? I made no changes to any settings before this started.
Rather than the Gemini overlord it might be worth asking the minions at Google as @Shell suggested (although I suspect that most of the minions have moved on).
Gemini did suggest a workaround that is effective - use the copy/paste icon button at the bottom of Gemini’s response to copy the text to the clipboard. Paste and match style works with that in Scrivener. But, you have to do that after each response since it only copies the latest response. And, it doesn’t include your own question in the copied text.
I’m using Gemini Pro, and asking it complex world-building questions for brainstorming, NOT having it write any prose. The questions it comes back at me with are sometimes fascinating in themselves.
I suspect the problem is in how they are marking paragraphs in the live page, rather than it being a matter of formatting—or rather maybe they are for some insane reason using CSS to break lines instead of <p>…</p> around each paragraph. If the text itself has no actual breaks in it, just the appearance of them, then paste and match style or perhaps even paste would not work well with the result.
Does it not have some way to export/save to file, or copy an entire session? That seems like it would be a rudimentary feature.
Another option, if regular paste works, would be try to use the Documents ▸ Convert ▸ Text to Default Formatting... command after pasting. It’s an extra step, but less of one than copying each response individually I’m sure. That would probably also be something you’d want to use if it can export a text file, too.
Other things to try would be a different browser (from a completely different branch, i.e. if you use Vivaldi, a Chromium-based browser, then try something like Firefox, which uses a completely different code base), as they all tend to copy things a little differently.
It seems unrelated, but I’ve been running into other problems with Google services too. Recently – out of the blue – a FireFox extension I’ve used for years (Ghostery) ran afoul of something probably vibe-coded by Gemini with limited human interactions. It was so breaking that I have to disable the extention altogether if I want to access gmail from the browser. Just whitelisting Google isn’t enough.
I expect that you are finding something unrelated but similar. Gemini is probably intentionally poisoning its output to prevent it from being used by other LLMs with or without human assistance.
Always the thief most worried about getting robbed.
It does export to Gmail and Google docs, but that’s an extra step too compared to how it was acting earlier. I’ll work with it, just wondered if there was a known workaround.
All I can really add, productively, is that Vivaldi has no issues copying the text out of a test session I made (not pro though), into either TextEdit or Scrivener, when using regular paste and paste-and-match-style. With Paste and Match Style I got what I would consider to be (largely) plain-text friendly output. Paragraphs are separated by an empty line. With formatted paste, again it looks like you would expect (a little too much formatting, sure, but that’s typical). The only thing I saw it really mess up with was a sample equation, and to be fair that’s understandable, as that’s rather complex to convey from HTML to RTF.
So again, your browser might be part of the problem. I’m not saying Vivaldi, but Brave or Opera, or some other browser based on that engine might do better. Even Safari seemed fine to me (it didn’t put a clear line between chat responses, causing them to appear adjacent in plain text, but it certainly didn’t merge paragraphs completely).
This test was run on macOS 26.4 with up-to-date browsers.