Paste Without Formatting command?

I'm trying to wrap my head around how one would display text in a word processing (or page layout) application "without formatting". How big would the text be? What colour? What font?

The item occupying the same position in the Pages Edit menu is as shown below.

Paste and Match Style ignores any Style (formatting) which has been applied to the text as copied, and adopts the style set at the location where the material is pasted. If the Style at that point in the document is "Plain text," then that's what you'll get.

(Ignore the keyboard short cut, it's a User Generated one, and won't be on your menu.)

Regards,

Barry

Freeform is a style.

When you apply it, the text get :

a specific font

a specific size

a specific color.

If you are starting from the Blank template,

using Paste and Match Style is supposed to apply exactly the same attributes.

Alas, it's not true and Paste and Match Style is more efficient.

Look at this screenshot:

At first, I pasted the blue text.

My second action was to apply Paste and Match Style to the same clipboard's contents.

My third action was to paste again the same clipboard then apply to this late block the Freeform style.

As you may see, in the late case, the behavior is far from perfect.

Don't worry if the default style isn't the same on your machine.

As I described some days ago, I edited the Blank template so that it defaults to Hoefler Text because I dislike SansSerif fonts.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) dimanche 29 janvier 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

Aha!

Hadn't twigged to the fact you were talking about pasting some RTF copy.

Did a test, though. Copy generated as RTF in Mail, and Copied from the Mail message.

Top line pasted using Edit > Paste.

Second line is the same copy, pasted using Edit > Paste and Match Style.

And here's your example, copied from the forum, then pasted into Pages using Paste and Match Style:

The remaining words in blue and underlined are due to their including a hyperlink. Pages recognizes the link an automatically applies the colour and underline, overriding the Paste and Match Style setting.

Regards,

Barry

Hi Barry

Paste and Match Style has the same shortcut on my machine and, after double checking, I'm sure that it's not a custom one.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) dimanche 29 janvier 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

Oclair

As Yvan has pointed out Freeform is not an absence of formatting.

Either Paste and Match Style

or

Select the text and double click the Style name you want in the Styles Drawer to force the styling on the text and remove all other styling.

Peter

Does anyone know how to really paste plain text? The reason I'm asking is because I can't get rid of links when I copy something from the web. The only way I found is to paste the text, then go open the inspector tab "links", click on "disable all links", and then go through every link one by one and disable it with the inspector checkbox.

Keep a plain text TextEdit document open.

Paste into that and then copy the text back and paste into Pages.

Peter

Text Edit is still the best place to lose the formatting. I was really expecting Pages to have something better this time around (it's been years since I tried it out)... now I'm waiting for the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac, and I'm finding the learning curve is difficult.

For work I am copying lines from a spreadsheet and creating paragraphs in Word or Pages. Word can lose the table formatting so easily. Pages will not lose the table, even with the "Paste without Formatting" feature... this only changes the font, not the table.

Text Edit to the rescue!