Paste as plain text

gjrg · Post by **gjrg** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 12:37 pm

I often paste text from MS Office applications and I then have to tidy up all the "smart" quotes (single and double), ellipsis, dashes etc etc in order to turn the text into pure ASCII.

Would it be possible to add an option to do this - for example a "Paste as plain text" option to the right-click menu? I've seen this in other apps (e.g KeyNote) and it's very useful.

Post by **MudGuard** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 9:22 pm

Did you already ask Microsoft to add an option "Copy as plain text" to their MS Office applications?

Or add that functionality yourself? MS Office can be extended with Visual Basic macros.

In my opinion, it makes much more sense to fix the problem at the root of it ...

SteveH · Post by **SteveH** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 10:17 pm

Is this any use http://www.extrabit.com/plaintextclipboard/?

I might give this one a try myself. I use a VB macro to accomplish this in MS Word because of the brain dead way that the application sometimes pastes in formatting.

gjrg · Post by **gjrg** » Thu Dec 11, 2008 8:10 am

SteveH - thanks for the suggestion. The utility you suggest will remove formatting like bold and underline (which, of course, TextPad already does), but not the smart quotes etc (which is what I really want to remove).

MudGuard - I take you point that the problem is really "caused" by Microsoft, but it's not really a problem for me until I start working with the text in TextPad (I want to keep smart quotes in the Word text and lose them in the plain text). I've got a macro in TextPad that sort of does the job, but I'm not that technical so I was hoping that the same feature might (eventually) make it into TextPad.

Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to reply.