Plain text

Plain text is basically text without any formatting. There are no bold, italic, underlined symbols. There are no add-ons, like hyperlinks or built-in pictures. Just pure text.

There are two types of text editors. The first type uses only plain text, without any formatting (like Notepad). The second supports different formatting styles. These are RTF (Rich Text Format) editors. You can use different font types, italic and bold text selection and so on. Examples of such editors are WordPad and MS Word.

If you paste text to some RTF editor you often face with a problem.

For example, you create some document in MS Word. You use Tahoma font, 12 pt. Then you copy and paste some text from a web document, and get Arial font, 10pt. So you need to change fonts by yourself. Not too exciting waste of time. Much easier should be to previously delete formatting from the copied text and paste plain text.

There are several ways to delete formatting from the clipboard.

• Do it with help of a plain text editor:
  • Copy text from a source (i.e web page or any rtf-editor)
  • Open some plain text editor i.e. Notepad or Flashnote handy rough copy for text
  • Paste the text to it
  • Select and copy the text back to the clipboard from the editor
  • And finally paste it to the destination (i.e. MS Word).
• Second way is much easer, just use our small freeware Get Plain Text utility - so you can do all this in one click.
• Finally, if you use our Clipdiary clipboard manager you can use it to convert clipboard to plain text on fly. There is special hot key (Hit ctrl+shift+v by default) - just press it and Clipdiary will paste the plain text for you.