Regular readers ofMac Gemsknow that I expend a mint of clip work with text — and that I ’m always look for way to pick up that schoolbook . For the ultimate in textual matter cleaning , my putz of choice is Unmarked Software’stextSOAP , which I spread over back in December of 2004 , but sometimes I just need to divest the data formatting from text — off its fancy fonts and styles . base on the feedback I ’ve received from reader , I ’m not alone . It seems it ’s clean common for people to copy text from a vane page , e - mail message , or document , and then have to reformat it once it ’s pasted into the object text file .
In July 2004 , I showed you Plain Clip , an practical app that , when launched , strips the data format of text on the Clipboard . It ’s a handy utility that I ’ve used regularly over the past year and a one-half . However , I recently discovered Pozytron ’s freePlaintextPaste 0.2 ( ) . Instead of requiring you to plunge a separate program to strip formatting from text , PlaintextPaste actually modify the Edit menu of Cocoa program to let in a number of new and utilitarian item :
Because these are actual menu item , you may use Mac OS X ’s keyboard shortcut feature of speech ( in the Keyboard panelling of System Preferences ) to delegate your own keyboard cutoff . For case , you could assign Control - Shift - fivesome to the raw Paste Plain Text item .
Via PlaintextPaste ’s preferences ( in the SparkPlug pane of System Preferences — PlaintextPaste is a spark plug - in for the Spark InputManager ) , you could pick out which of the above fare items look , as well as whether they seem in the main Edit menu or in a hierarchical menu . In fount of a engagement , you’re able to also prevent the menu items from appear at all in particular app .
The adult disadvantage of PlaintextPaste is that because of the way it modifies the Edit menu , its menu items look only in Cocoa applications , such as Mail , TextEdit , OmniOutliner , Mellel , and Nisus Writer Express ; Microsoft Word , BBEdit , and other non - Cocoa Christian Bible processors and text editor in chief are out of luck . In this deference , Plain Clip is more versatile — since it ’s a separate software program , it works with all applications . But if you pass most of your text meter in Cocoa applications , PlaintextPaste is more commodious and provides more options .
PlaintextPaste is compatible with Mac OS X 10.3 ( Panther ) and afterward .
