Shortcuts now uses the iOS Markup editor which does not support cropping. This shortcut is no longer functional. The app also no longer supports shortcut file imports and workflow.is links no longer function. Any links to shortcuts in this post have been updated to use iCloud links.

You’ve no doubt seen many Twitter users post “text shots” – a text clipping in the form of an image as a way to provide more content than the 140 character limit allows. The process of doing this can be pretty laborious, though a few apps now exist, such as OneShot, that make this process easier.

1Password for Mac has a clever way to handle QR codes https://t.co/efJu8lQp3V pic.twitter.com/G6oAPFp4GD — Jordan Merrick (@jordanmerrick) April 6, 2015

As an alternative to using a separate app, we can use a Workflow Action extension to post a text shot to Twitter, along with the title and URL of the page it refers to. The tweet I posted and embedded above was created using this workflow.

To use the workflow, first take a screenshot of the portion of the page that you want to post as an excerpt and then run the Action extension. The workflow uses this screenshot, giving you the option to crop it specifically to the text you want to include. The content of a tweet will be prefilled with the image, the title of the page you’re viewing and the URL, which you can then edit with anything else you’d like to include.