AcePure

AcePure is a special AceText feature that enables you to paste plain text into an application after another application has placed both plain text and other formats onto the clipboard. The default hotkey is Win+Alt+P. When you press this hotkey when working with an application other than AceText, AceText removes all clipboard formats except plain text from the clipboard. If you like to use the mouse, right-click on the AceText tray icon and select AcePure from the menu.

If the option “paste the text on the clipboard directly into the active application” is selected in the Hotkeys Preferences then AceText sends a Ctrl+V key combination after it has reduced the clipboard to plain text. This way, you can use the AcePure hotkey to directly paste plain text into the application you’re working with. If your application uses a key combination other than Ctrl+V for pasting then you can configure that application in the Applications Preferences.

A typical scenario where AcePure is useful is when copying text from a web page into a document. Your web browser copies the text you selected in both plain text and HTML formats to the clipboard. When you paste into your word processor, it uses the HTML format to paste so that it can preserve all the formatting of the web page. But this does mean that the pasted text will use the same font as the web page, which may be different than the font of your document. When pasting just a few words or sentences from a web page, you likely want to retain the formatting of your document, not that of the web page where you found the text. By pressing the AcePure hotkey, you tell AceText to remove the HTML from the clipboard. This leaves only the plain text to be pasted by the word processor. The word processor will apply your document’s formatting to the pasted text.

AcePure does not convert formatted text like HTML into plain text. AcePure relies on the fact that most applications that are capable of copying formatted text also copy plain text as an alternative. If an application does not put plain text on the keyboard, you would not be able to copy and paste from that application into applications like Microsoft Notepad that only support plain text. So when you use AcePure, you are pasting the plain text conversion that was provided by the application that copied the text.