Plain Paste



Because we use styled text in so many places in macOS (including when copying something from a web page), it’s easy to wind up frustrated when you want to paste it into a document or an email without carrying along its original (or a similar) font, type size, italics or Roman, indents, bullet list items, or other elements.

The plain text pasting feature is implemented by the PastePlainText plugin which is a part of the Clipboard plugin. It detects the Ctrl / Cmd + Shift + V keystroke during the paste and causes the pasted text to inherit the styles of the content it was pasted into. When you highlight a bunch of text and press Ctrl+C, you are copying not only the content of text but the format of these texts as well into the clipboard. Then when you want to paste them into another application, you are pasting both the content and the format all together at the same time. Plain Paste When plainPaste option is enabled, Froala WYSIWYG HTML Editor filters the pasted content and keeps only plain text by removing all its rich formatting.

More funding for mac. Here are several ways to copy styled text and then paste it without formatting.

Use the Paste and Match Style menu item in Apple apps. Most Apple software that supports adding text lets you choose Edit > Paste and Match Style, which strips most formatting from the text on the clipboard and matches whatever style is in place at the insertion point at which you paste. However, while it removes some styling, it doesn’t remove all of it.

In Microsoft Word, use one of several paste commands. Word offers Edit > Paste and Match Formatting, similar to Pages and other Apple software. But it also has the Edit > Paste Special set of options, which includes Unformatted Text. This strips all rich-text attributes.

Use a text-only editor to paste, then copy the results. Many apps don’t support rich-text formatting. Pasting text into one of those apps strips all styles and fonts. You can then copy that same section of text, and it’s unstyled. Ironically, the macOS-bundled TextEdit doesn’t offer an option to edit…just the text. Instead, try BBEdit. (While it downloads as a 30-day free trial for the paid version, after 30 days it remains free to use, just with a more restrained set of text-editing features.)

Get Pastebot. The Pastebot utility from Tapbots received a five-mouse review from me in 2016, and it remains a constant part of my daily routine. You can set a keyboard shortcut to paste the current clipboard as plain, unformatted text, something I do 50 times a day. And you can set other shortcuts or use a filter feature to reformat text on the clipboard before it’s pasted.

This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by a Macworld reader.

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Plain Pastel Blue Background

Regular readers of Mac Gems know that I spend a lot of time working with text—and that I’m always looking for ways to clean up that text. For the ultimate in text cleaning, my tool of choice is Unmarked Software’s textSOAP, which I covered back in December of 2004, but sometimes I just need to strip the formatting from text—remove its fancy fonts and styles. Based on the feedback I’ve received from readers, I’m not alone. It seems it’s fairly common for people to copy text from a Web page, e-mail message, or document, and then have to reformat it once it’s pasted into the target document.

Plain Paste

In July 2004, I showed you Plain Clip, an application that, when launched, strips the formatting of text on the Clipboard. It’s a handy utility that I’ve used regularly over the past year and a half. Tiff editor for mac free. However, I recently discovered Pozytron’s free PlaintextPaste 0.2 ( ). Instead of requiring you to launch a separate application to strip formatting from text, PlaintextPaste actually modifies the Edit menu of Cocoa applications to include a number of new and useful items:

  • Paste Plain Text: Pastes the contents of the Clipboard as plain text, stripping all formatting.
  • Copy Plain Text: Copies highlighted text, unformatted, to the Clipboard, never bothering to grab text styles in the first place.
  • Paste as 7-Bit ASCII: Pastes the contents of the Clipboard as 7-bit ASCII, stripping all “high ASCII” characters (and, if possible, replacing them wth their closest 7-bit ASCII equivalents).
  • Swap Selection with Clipboard: Swaps highlighted text with the contents of the Clipboard—in other words, this feature replaces highlighted text with the Clipboard’s contents and then places the text that was replaced onto the Clipboard. (If no text is selected, it pastes the Clipboard contents and then clears the Clipboard afterwards.)
  • Special Characters: Choosing this item displays OS X’s Character Palette—useful if another third-party add-on has disabled it unintentionally. (If you end up seeing two Special Characters items, you can turn one off via PlaintextPaste’s preferences.)

Because these are actual menu items, you can use Mac OS X’s keyboard shortcut feature (in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences) to assign your own keyboard shortcuts. For example, you could assign Control-Shift-V to the new Paste Plain Text item.

Plain Pastel

Via PlaintextPaste’s preferences (in the SparkPlug pane of System Preferences—PlaintextPaste is a plug-in for the Spark InputManager), you can choose which of the above menu items appear, as well as whether they appear in the main Edit menu or in a submenu. In case of a conflict, you can also prevent the menu items from appearing at all in particular applications.

Plain Pastel Blue Background

The biggest disadvantage of PlaintextPaste is that because of the way it modifies the Edit menu, its menu items appear only in Cocoa applications, such as Mail, TextEdit, OmniOutliner, Mellel, and Nisus Writer Express; Microsoft Word, BBEdit, and other non-Cocoa word processors and text editors are out of luck. In this respect, Plain Clip is more versatile—since it’s a separate application, it works with all applications. But if you spend most of your text time in Cocoa applications, PlaintextPaste is more convenient and provides more options.

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PlaintextPaste is compatible with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) and later.