Strip Text Formatting with Gmail and Plain Text Paste App

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share the tools I use to turn formatted text into plain text on the PC and on the iPad or iPhone. 

We’ve all had this problem before — you are cutting and pasting some text from a website or document and the formatting is all messed up. Maybe it brings with it some strange fonts or it has peculiar column formatting or, more frequently for me, giant spacing between lines.  If this has ever happened to you, I don’t have to tell you that trying to fix it within Google Docs or Evernote particularly can be an exercise in frustration.  You try to get rid of the space here and it appears in the next line.

I have two ways of stripping out the text formatting before I even attempt to paste depending on whether I’m working on a PC or an iPad.  Let’s go through them both.

PC - Gmail

If at all possible, I try to find ways to do things on my PC that don’t require me to download additional software. I don’t mind using browser extensions, but I have had issues with viruses when I download software that is off the beaten path.  So, for this issue — I'm glad that I can use the functionality built into the Gmail website.

Let me show you with this piece of text.  If I paste this into Evernote directly, it will look like this.  I can't get rid of these spaces or the links.  So, I open a browser, I navigate to Gmail and hit compose a new email.  Now I paste my text in either by hitting Ctrl+V or right click and Paste.  So, now select everything and hit this button here that looks like a T with an x beside it.  That is the remove formatting button.  Viola!  Doesn't look pretty, but this plain text is much easier to deal with since the line spacing is fixed and the links are gone.  Next, 

iPad/iPhone - Plain Text App

On the iPad, I have absolutely no problems downloading new apps, trying them out, and discarding them if they don't work for me.  Thankfully iPads don't have issues with viruses yet.  And iPad apps are SO inexpensive when compared to PC software.   This app happens to be $1.99 and is worth every penny.   It's called Plain Text Paste app.  It really just has one function -- stripping formatting from text.  I'll show you with the same text as before.

First copy the text you want to strip formatting from, now open the app.  It immediately pastes in whatever you've put in the iPad's clipboard, so viola!  It's already there.  You can see it is a pretty bare bones app.  The only additional option is to remove new lines, which takes out all of the carriage returns or paragraphs.  So, not only does it paste in what is in the clipboard, but then it automatically copies this new text to the iPad's clipboard.  So you don't need to select or copy anything.  Just go to your document and hit Paste and there is the format stripped text.  Let me show you again.  Copy the text, go into Plain Text Paste app and it pastes it in automatically, now go into Evernote, start a new note and and paste it in.  Streamlined and easy.  I use this app ALL THE TIME.  

Let me know how this works for you!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!