Fixing text that arrives broken
Every guide below describes one shape of copy-paste damage: what it looks like, why it happens, how to fix it by hand in a few seconds, and what the extension does for you. If a step does not apply to your case, the guide says so rather than claiming a fix it does not have.
The six guides
- Hard-wrapped line breaks — a break lands mid-sentence after pasting from a PDF or email.
- Invisible characters — the words look right, but search, spacing and exports misbehave.
- Curly quotes and dashes — punctuation that breaks code, JSON and shell commands.
- Lists that will not become Markdown — bullets that collapse or gain stray spacing.
- Formatting that rides along — fonts, colours and link styling following the text.
- The plain-text step — the general routine, and the order to apply the fixes in.
What the extension is
Micro-Formatter is a Chrome extension that cleans text you paste into it, or text you select on a page. It runs entirely inside your browser: no account, no server, and nothing you paste is sent anywhere. It is not a converter for documents, and it does not rewrite text for you — every button is a specific text transformation you choose.
What it cannot do
It sees only text. If the problem is HTML markup (<span
style="font-family:…"> wrapping every word), the styling is already
outside the text by the time the extension gets it — paste through your
editor's plain-text shortcut instead. Photos, tables and images never survive a
text round trip either.