Formatting that rides along
Fonts, colours, sizes and link styling follow the text into a field that should be plain. This is the one case where the extension is often the wrong tool, and this page says so before offering it.
What you are seeing
- Pasted text keeps a heading's size, or a table's borders.
- Every word is wrapped in a
<span style="…">once the text reaches an HTML source view. - An email signature arrives in purple with the sender's font.
Why it happens
When you copy from a browser, the clipboard carries two versions: the visible text and an HTML fragment describing how it looked. The receiving app picks whichever it prefers. A rich editor takes the HTML, so the styling comes along whether you wanted it or not.
Fix it by hand — usually the right fix
- Use your editor's plain-text paste: Ctrl+Shift+ V on Windows and Linux, Cmd+Shift+ V on macOS.
- Or paste into any bare text box first, then copy from there.
This drops the HTML variant entirely, which is exactly what you want. A tool that receives only text cannot remove markup it never saw.
What the extension does instead
Micro-Formatter works on text, not on HTML. Strip
formatting is still useful once the text is plain — it removes
zero-width characters, collapses repeated spaces and tabs, reduces three or
more newlines to two, and normalises curly punctuation — but it will not strip
<span> tags or colours out of a copied fragment.
If the text you have already contains markup, you need an HTML-to-text step, which is outside this extension's scope.
What it will not do
It does not touch images, tables, footnotes or comments, because none of those exist in the text layer. It also cannot restore a link's destination after a plain-text paste; if you need the URL, copy it separately.