Clean Up Formatted Text
Strip formatting on paste
What is Remove Text Formatting?
Strip the junk out of formatted text without throwing away the parts you want. Most paste cleaners only flatten everything to plain text, but the real need is usually selective: keep the bold and the links, and lose the Google Docs font stack, the 11pt sizing and the span soup. Every category is a toggle here. It also fixes the things that quietly break diffs, code and search later: curly quotes, em dashes, non-breaking spaces and zero-width characters. And it can strip tracking parameters out of any link in the paste, which no other cleaner does.
How do I use Remove Text Formatting?
- Click the paste box and press Ctrl+V or Command+V.
- Toggle what to keep: bold, italic, links, lists, headings.
- Read the receipt showing exactly what was removed.
- Copy as plain text, or as cleaned rich text to keep the formatting you kept.
When should I use Remove Text Formatting?
Reach for this before pasting into a CMS, a ticket, an email or a code editor. To change capitalisation instead, use Case Converter. To turn formatted content into Markdown, use HTML to Markdown. To count what you pasted, use Word Counter.
Frequently asked questions
Does it need permission to read my clipboard?
No. The clipboard is read inside the paste event, which browsers allow without a prompt because you initiated it. The tool has no access to your clipboard at any other time, and never reads it in the background.
Why is pasted text from Google Docs entirely bold?
Google Docs wraps its clipboard payload in a bold element carrying an internal identifier. Pasted naively, that makes the whole block bold. This tool unwraps that wrapper specifically, so only genuinely bold text stays bold.
What is the junk that comes from Word?
Word ships mso-prefixed style properties, class names like MsoNormal, namespaced elements, and conditional comments that can contain an entire alternate copy of the document. All of them are removed here.
Why remove zero-width and non-breaking spaces?
Because they are invisible and they break things later. A non-breaking space is not a space to a search or a code parser, and zero-width characters make two identical-looking lines compare as different in a diff. They come in constantly from web pages and word processors.
What does stripping tracking links do?
It removes analytics and advertising parameters such as utm_source, fbclid, gclid and msclkid from any URL in the paste, leaving the link itself working. Sharing a link with those attached passes along a record of where you got it.
Can I keep some formatting instead of flattening everything?
Yes, and that is the point of the tool. Bold, italic, links, lists and headings are each a toggle, so you can keep the meaningful structure and drop the fonts, sizes and colours. Copy rich puts the cleaned formatting back on your clipboard.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything runs in your browser. Your files never leave your device, and there is no server component for this tool.
Tools that pair well with Remove Text Formatting
- Case Converter camelcase, snake_case, etc., free and in your browser.
- HTML to Markdown Converter clean html → markdown, free and in your browser.
- Word Counter words, characters, reading time, free and in your browser.
- Reverse Text Generator reverse characters or words, free and in your browser.