how to paste with no formatting

If you find it annoying that in Pages and other Apple apps, there’s no easy way to remove rich text formatting when you copy and paste from websites and other rich text sources, this could be just the tip for you.

The video begins with a demonstration and then shows you how to create the shortcut shown. If you don’t see captions at the bottom of the video, be sure to press the ‘CC’ button in the YouTube video controller bar at the bottom of the screen.

The procedure is fairly straightforward:

1. Open Automator.app and create a new service by clicking on the gear/cog.

2. Change the ‘Service receives’ menu to ‘no input’.

3. Type ‘Apples’ in the Action filter bar, and drag a ‘Run AppleScript’ action into the main pane.

4. Clear the default text, and copy/paste this into the window:

set the clipboard to «class ktxt» of ((the clipboard as text) as record)

5. Click the hammer icon to compile the code, and then ‘command-S’ to save it (you don’t need to choose a save location).

6. The service will now appear in your Services menu (eg. Pages > Services > plainTxt).

Whenever you copy some formatted text, just click on the plainTxt item in the Services menu before you paste, and you’ll get plain text instead.

7. Follow the second half of the video if you want to make a global shortcut.

Enjoy! 🙂

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