PureText – paste anywhere without formatting

Let’s say you are writing and you want to quote some text from a webpage in your message or document. So you select the text and copy it, but then when you paste it after your text you find that it is in a different font, font size and color.  Worse than that, when you try to keep typing after the quoted text, you see that your font style has been hijacked by the new text you pasted. Here is an example — notice how the font changes because the text came formatted from somewhere else:

Do you remember Otter Pops? They consist of, and I quote, ” a plastic tube filled with flavored sugary liquid; after being frozen the top is cut off. The frozen juice is eaten out of the top of the tube, like a popsicle without a stick.” [ACK! What happened to my font! Why doesn't my computer realize I don't want to change the font here?].

Does that situation look familiar?

 If so, here is a great (free!) little Windows utility I have used for several years to come to your rescue: PureText. Running PureText puts an icon down in your system tray (lower right screen corner) and it adds a keyboard shortcut that works everywhere. Once it is running you press [WindowsKey] + [v] to tell the computer to “paste the text, but please ignore any font formatting that the text had before.” It works like a charm — the text you paste adopts whatever style you were already using, eliminating the chore of trying to reformat the text after it is pasted in.

Every time I am put on a new version of Windows, PureText is one of the first items I install. To me it is indispensable!

Now for you Mac users (I’m one at home), I have heard (but not tried it yet) that PlainClip does the same thing for the Mac OS, but you will probably also want to first  install a Mac hotkey tool like Spark to make it easier to use (otherwise you will have to double-click the PlainClip app everytime you want to use it).