Have you ever noticed that when you copy the text contents from a website or anywhere that has formatting and paste it to a new Word document file, it will carry along the formatting? Here is an example that I experience everyday in forum because by default it has Rich-Text Editor enabled. I tried copying a text content from the blog site that has bold and also a hyperlink.

When I paste it in the forum’s rich-text editor reply box, you’d notice that it is pasting the exact same thing with the bold, color and hyperlink formatting included. If you paste it in Microsoft Word, the same thing would happen. This feature is convenient because it allows computer newbies to paste what they see without knowing the HTML or forum BBCode. The annoying part of this feature is sometimes we don’t really need all these formatting. There are two ways which I normally do to paste a copied text without the formatting that is by pasting it to notepad, then select all, copy again and then paste. If it is a short text, I’d paste it to the browser’s URL bar, copy and paste it.

Now I don’t need to go through all those steps to paste a formatted text without the formatting.


PureText makes this simple by adding a new Windows hot-key that allows you to paste text to any application without formatting. After running PureText.exe, you will see a “PT” tray icon appear near the clock on your task bar. You can click on this icon to remove formatting from the text that is currently on the clipboard. You can right-click on the icon to display a menu with more options. The easiest way to use PureText is to simply use its hot-key to paste text instead of using the standard CTRL+V hot-key that is built into most Windows applications. The default hotkey is WINDOWS+V and it can be changed in Options.

PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs.

PureText is a free, small and portable tool that works on Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Running it in notification area takes only 4MB from your memory and doesn’t lag your computer in any way. The good thing about this tool is it doesn’t replace the paste command (CTRL+V) in Windows, but it gives an extra pasting method with a new hotkey (WINDOWS+V).
[ Download PureText ]