How do I strip all existing formatting when I paste?

Copying Text from External Programs or Websites

Like many other rich text programs such as Word and LibreOffice, Scrivener supports the ability to paste the contents of your clipboard along with any of the text's existing fonts and styles. However it can oftentimes be useful to paste as though the original source was plain text, especially when pasting from a web browser. The menu command for this is Edit > Paste and Match Style.

The Paste and Match Style command will strip any existing formatting from your clipboard text upon pasting it, so the text will instead conform to whatever formatting you have set at the current insertion point in the Editor. So say you copy a paragraph of Helvetica 11 text from a website. In Scrivener, if you click in a document that uses Times New Roman 12, using Paste and Match Style will ensure the text is pasted in Times New Roman 12.

Copying Footnotes and Annotations within Scrivener

Scrivener handles inline annotations and footnotes similarly to regular styles like bold and italics. Thus, when you copy and paste an annotation or footnote from one Scrivener document to another, the text will remain in that form of notation. On the other hand, using Paste and Match Style will allow you to paste text that was originally in an annotation as ordinary text. Any text that was in the form of an comment or footnote will be included in-line as unformatted, bracketed text.

Using Paste and Match Style with a selection containing footnote text or a linked footnote will create a plain-text footnote, inserting a bracketed numeral in the text and separating the footnote with two empty lines. To paste an inline footnote as regular text, copy and paste it normally, then remove the footnote formatting from the selection by toggling off Format > Inline Footnote.

To strip footnotes, annotations, and comments from your text selection, choose Edit > Copy Special > Copy without Comments and Footnotes, then paste as normal. Taking a Snapshot before doing this is often a good idea.