The plain-text step
Almost every copy-paste problem on this site comes from one shortcut: text moving straight from a rich source into a rich destination. Put a plain-text step in the middle and most of it stops happening.
The routine
- Copy from the source as usual.
- Paste into something that has no formatting to inherit — a bare text box, a notes field with plain text, or Micro-Formatter.
- Clean it there: reflow, then strip, in that order.
- Copy the cleaned text and paste it where it belongs.
The order matters. Reflow decides where sentence breaks are, so it needs the text before whitespace is collapsed. Strip then removes hidden characters and normalises punctuation, which does not move any words.
Knowing which fix you need
- A break in the middle of a sentence → reflow.
- The text looks right but behaves wrongly → hidden characters.
- Code or JSON fails on a line that looks fine → curly quotes.
- Bullets are literal characters or collapse → lists.
- Fonts and colours follow the text → rich text.
When the text is fine as it is
Deliberate line breaks are not damage. Addresses, poems, code blocks, tables written by hand and anything where the author chose the wrapping should survive untouched — reflow will happily join those lines, so check before you copy the result.
Fastest path
Select the text on the page, right-click and choose Format selected text, or press Alt+Shift+F. The extension opens with your selection already in the input box; nothing is sent anywhere, because there is nowhere to send it.