If you’ve copied text from a webpage or a PDF file to an email, you’ve encountered the problem associated with formatting being copied along with the text. The result can look very strange indeed, with broken lines and odd fonts. Email replies are even worse, with all those problems, and the crazy >>> characters to boot.

The good news is that there are several free programs available that allow you to copy the text you want without the unwanted formatting.

One of my favorites is StripMail. It’s a stand-alone program that takes the clipboard contents and converts it into plain text without formatting.

It removes HTML and Word formatting, removes email reply “>” and “|” characters and will optionally remove line feeds so that broken lines are restored into proper paragraphs. At the touch of a button the stripped text is restored to the clipboard, ready for pasting into your document.

It works like a charm. I use it daily and it’s one of the most useful utilities on my PC.

The only downside of StripMail is that you have to run the program each time you want to clean some text. I overcome this by assigning a hotkey to run StripMail to automatically strip the clipboard contents ready for pasting. Removing formatting is then as simple as copying the text, hitting the hotkey and pasting.

You can create the hotkey by using the freeware program AutoHotkey.

The magic line you need for your AutoHotkey script is
#v::Run %A_ProgramFiles%Stripmailstripmail.exe -d -x
(assuming that you put StripMail in C:Program FilesStripmail or similar) which assigns the WindowsKey-V hotkey combination.

Now the next time you want to copy text from an email or website, just copy the text as normal, hit WindowsKey-V, and paste. Voila, the unwanted formatting has been removed.

Source : techsupportalert