Customization is one of the perks you’re looking at when designing a project of any kind. Working with text, this can mean writing with different stylish letters, using a bigger font, or various colors.
Since everybody’s doing this and one can easily create a custom font, it gets difficult, or at least a bit frustrating when pasting text in a document and trying to keep a single formatting type active.
It can take a little time using just Windows tools, but it’s not an impossible task to get rid of this frustration once and for all. On the other hand, there’s a tiny, powerful app that completely handles this task. Whatever your choice, here are a few tips for pasting clean text.
Using Windows tools only
Step 1: Create a new Plain Text Document on your desktop and open it.
Step 2: Paste all text you need inside the document.
Note: Windows’ Text Editor only supports basic text, discarding all formatting options once you paste a bit of text.
Step 3: Copy all text from the plain text document to your project.
Step 4: Perform any necessary trimmings and formatting to make it look good.
Hint: In some cases, using the Paste Special (Ctrl + Shift + V) option lets you decide whether or not to remove formatting. However, this function is not supported by all programs.
Hint 2: Formatting can be left as the last operation. Simply write down all text you need, without adding any other elements, select all text and choose formatting options.
Using third-party applications
Step 1: Download PureText.
Step 2: Since there’s no installer, just extract the archive and run it.
Step 3: Right-click the tray icon to access Options.
Step 4: Set a hotkey to use for pasting plain text.
Step 5 (optional): Make the application Automatically run each time you log on to Windows.
Now just press OK so all changes are confirmed. The application stays minimized in your system tray and only has this one job, to paste plain text. Just remember to use the hotkey you set, and not Ctrl + V as before.