Gee's Blog World: PureText lets you copy formatted text and paste it back as plain text

Monday, August 2, 2010

PureText lets you copy formatted text and paste it back as plain text

Filed under: Text, Utilities, Productivity

Weighing in at a massive 13 kilobytes, PureText is a classic freeware utility; it's tiny, portable (single file), straightforward, does one thing, and it does it well. It lets you copy rich text from a Web page, Word document, or any other source and paste it, clean and devoid of any formatting. It also makes a cute "bong!" sound when it does its job, but you can switch that off.

I can't begin to count the number of times when I wanted to paste a snippet from a Web page into an email, and the formatting completely screwed the rest of my email. You know, it changes the font, and then you have to copy the beginning of the email again, paste it after the Web page snippet, and edit over it (so that the formatting matches the beginning of the email); the whole thing gets pretty messy.

With PureText, just hit Win-V, and you're done. It's really handy!