Remove Formatting
Clean pasted text.
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What hides inside formatted text
Copying text from a web page or a word processor carries far more than the words. The clipboard holds a rich-text flavour containing font families, sizes, colours, background highlights, list structures, and often the source document's stylesheet fragments. Paste that into a CMS or an email and all of it comes too, which is why pasted paragraphs so often appear in the wrong font or with a stubborn white background.
There are also invisible passengers: non-breaking spaces, smart quotes and em dashes substituted by autocorrect, soft hyphens, and zero-width characters. Those can break code, corrupt search matching, and produce mysterious differences between two strings that look identical. Stripping formatting reduces everything to plain characters, which is the only reliable starting point when text is moving between systems.
Why we built this tool
The everyday case is publishing: pasting a document written in Word into a website and having it inherit the site's typography instead of Word's. Developers hit the other case, where a smart quote copied from a document breaks a snippet of code.
The documents involved are drafts and client work. Stripping formatting is a purely local string operation, so ours performs it in your browser with no request, no storage, and no length limit. It is a small tool, but the reasoning is the same as everywhere else on this site: the browser can already do it, so sending the text to a server would add risk and latency and gain nothing.
Tips and common mistakes
- Smart quotes and em dashes substituted by autocorrect will break code; strip them before pasting into a source file.
- Non-breaking spaces are the most common invisible passenger from web and word-processor copies.
- Paste as plain text in your destination application where the option exists — it saves a round trip.
- Reapply formatting in the destination so it inherits that system's styles rather than the source's.
Open Remove Formatting with a link
Remove Formatting can be handed its input by the link that opens it, so the page arrives with the work already done. This is meant for assistants and scripts: if a chatbot, an editor extension, or a command-line agent already holds your content, it can build a link instead of asking you to copy and paste into a box.
The payload rides in the fragment — the part of a URL after the #. Browsers never send the fragment to a server, so anything handed over this way stays on your device exactly as a dropped file would. A link that uses the query string instead is rewritten into the fragment by the page before any analytics or ad script can read the address.
Prefix any field with gz — #gztext= — to pass it as gzip-compressed base64url, which fits roughly five to ten times more into the same link. Links stay reliable up to about 8,000 characters; past that, chat apps and address bars start truncating them, and the page says so rather than loading half a document.
One exception to the privacy rule: ?url= tells the page to download the input from an address. That request goes from your browser straight to that server — not through ours — but it does leave your device, and it only works if the server allows cross-origin requests.
#text=— the text to work on
Example: https://mygadgets.ink/tools/remove-formatting/#text=...
Quick start: using Remove Formatting
- Paste your formatted text into the input above.
- Run the strip to reduce it to plain characters.
- Check that smart quotes, dashes, and special characters became what you wanted.
- Re-apply any formatting you actually need in the destination application.
- Copy the clean text out.
Follow with Remove Extra Spaces for whitespace, or HTML to Markdown if you want to keep the structure.