PureText is purely great

By | March 17, 2014
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Whatever email program you use, you’ve likely encountered this problem: You’re writing and email and you copy text from a Web page or a Word doc or PDF file, and paste it in your email. You notice that the font is different, the font size is different, the style is different — in short it looks awful. And just bad, everything you type after you paste something is in the same font and style as what you just pasted.

You can avoid pasting formatted text into a formatted email several ways. One way is to open NotePad (or some other text editor) and paste the text then copy the text from NotePad and paste it in your email. But there’s an easier way.

Sometimes, when we’re doing our newsletters, we’ll copy something from our Web site and paste it the HTML document, or we’ll copy part of a news article for our Newsbytes section, like email, pasting formatted text directly into a HTML (Web page) document results in  the fonts and styles being changed. This would result in a messy newsletter with several different fonts, font sizes and font styles — and that would be distracting and look awful. So we always pasted the copied text in to MetaPad (a text editor) then copy it from there and paste in the newsletter. Pasting formatted text into a text editor like MetaPad or NotePad removes all the formatting and converts it to plain text.

We have started using a program called PureText which allows us to copy formatted text and paste it into a HTML document (or an email) without pasting it in a text editor, by simply pressing Windows Key + V.

If you often pasted formatted text from Facebook, Web sites, Word docs, PDF docs, etc. into emails or web documents, you’ll find that PureText can save you a lot of time.

Here’s a bit from the developer’s site:

Have you ever copied some text from a web page or a document and then wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple by adding a new Windows hot-key (default is WINDOWS+V) that allows you to paste text to any application without formatting.

After running PureText.exe, you will see a “PT” 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. To configure PureText, right-click on its tray icon and choose “Options” from the pop-up menu. The default hot-key is WINDOWS+V, but this can be changed. In this Options window, you can also configure PureText to run each time you log into Windows.

What PureText Will and Will Not Do

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. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.

We know that know some of  your probably would never need a great little tool like this, but many of you  know the hassle of cross-formatting when pasting from one format into an email.  While you could paste whatever kind of formatted text and change your email to plain text, you’d end up with plain text email — and no styles or fonts or pictures allowed.

You can get PureText in 32-bit or 64-bit format. It does not install – it’s a zip file, just unzip it and click on the exe file to run it. You should of course, right-click on the exe and create shortcuts on your start menu, taskbar, or desktop, to make it easier to run it next time. The file sizes (both 32-bit and 64-bit) are under 20 KB…. so it’s a tiny program you might find very useful. You can read more about and/or download PureText from here.

 

 

2 thoughts on “PureText is purely great

  1. Alan

    Of course if you use Gmail you can just drop the original text copy into your message and click ‘Plain text mode’ in the chevron pull down bottom right of compose or remove formatting on the right hand end of the formatting bar in the compose box.

    Reply
    1. infoave Post author

      Gmail is not an email program. It’s a web-based application. We were not referring to Gmail, but if anyone using Gmail does not know when you right click to Paste in the compose Gmail, an option to paste as plain text appears in the menu, now you know. Also, if you have a WordPress blog or site, you can do the same thing.

      Reply

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