How to Remove Formatting From Text (Clear Rich Text)

Copy text from a web page or a document and paste it somewhere else, and it often drags along baggage — fonts, colors, sizes, links, and hidden styling that clash with wherever you put it. Removing formatting strips all of that, leaving clean plain text you can drop anywhere. This guide explains why pasted text misbehaves and how "clearing" it fixes a dozen small annoyances.

Why pasted text carries hidden formatting

When you copy from a formatted source — a website, Word, Google Docs — you copy not just the words but the *rich text*: the font family, size, color, bold/italic, links, and background. Paste that into an email, a CMS, or a form and the formatting comes too, often looking wrong and sometimes breaking the layout. It also hides invisible characters and inconsistent styling that cause subtle problems later.

How to remove formatting with this tool

1. Open the Remove Formatting tool.
2. Paste your formatted text.
3. Get clean plain text back.
4. Copy it wherever you need it.

Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

What "plain text" gives you

Stripping formatting reduces the content to just the characters — the words, spaces, and line breaks — with no styling attached. That means:

• It adopts the style of wherever you paste it instead of fighting it.
• No stray fonts or colors clashing with your document.
• No hidden links you did not want carried over.
• No invisible junk characters that cause odd behavior in forms and code.

The everyday scenarios it fixes

• Pasting into a CMS or email without importing a website's fonts and colors.
• Cleaning text copied from a PDF or Word doc before reusing it.
• Removing hyperlinks from copied content in one step.
• Normalizing mixed-format text assembled from several sources.

The "paste as plain text" habit

Many apps have a "paste without formatting" shortcut, but it is inconsistent and easy to forget, and some places do not offer it at all. Running text through a dedicated stripper guarantees a clean result every time, regardless of where it is going.

Related tools

For extra whitespace specifically — double spaces, stray tabs — Remove Extra Spaces targets that. To fix capitalization after stripping, Convert Case helps. Pulling text from a PDF first? Extract Text from PDF gets it out, then clean it here.

Common uses

• Clean copied web content before reuse.
• Strip styling from documents.
• Remove links in bulk.
• Prepare text for a form or CMS.

Privacy and limits

Stripping is fully local — no upload, nothing stored, offline once loaded. Open the Remove Formatting tool for clean plain text.