Why & How to Paste as Plain Text

When pasting text into your website from any source, be it a Word document, a PDF, another website, etc., you must always use the paste as plain text. This ensures that the formatting from the old document is removed so that the text is consistent with the style of your website. Introducing foreign code to your webpage can break the design of your website, such as entire components disappearing, links changing colour etc.
  1. When editing a page in the administration end of the website, click on the Paste as Plain Text icon RTE_8.gif
  2. If you have already prepared the text in another document, be it a Word doc., a PDF or an existing website, you must use the Paste as Plain Text function. Click on the Paste as Plain Text button. A new window will open up. Click into the window and press the Control and V keys on your keyboard (Ctrl+V) at the same time to paste the text.
    paste-as-plain-text.png
  3. Then click the OK button and you will see the text appear in the RTE without any formatting.
    For content with a few paragraphs, select all the text in the RTE and set the 'Format' dropdown option to be 'Normal'.

Format your content

  1. Remove any additional unnecessary spaces by clicking on the empty line and pressing the 'Delete' key, or by selecting the start of the next line and pressing the 'Backspace' key. 
This will put the text into nicely formatted paragraphs and keep the spacing even throughout your page. To create additional paragraphs use the 'Enter' key. If you want to just move to a new line but not have a paragraph gap, you can hold down the 'Ctrl' key and press 'Enter'.

Note: This is a handy tool to use if you have inconsistent fonts throughout your website and you would like them all to be standardised - simply cut the text from the webpage and paste it in the plain text editor and you can then select the fonts you like.