How do I avoid extra lines or other formatting differences when pasting in from another source?

2 min. readlast update: 10.17.2023

Copy and paste is a super useful tool but when copying from websites, or other formatted documents such as emails or PDFs, you can bring along hidden formatting tags when you paste into text entry boxes. This can result in unexpected formatting, for example, the appearance of extra lines or different font styling.

How to resolve this depends on the formatting differences you want to correct. The simplest starting point is to either paste in the text values alone, and ignore the formatting tags, or you can remove the formatting tags from the Touch Stay text entry box after pasting in.

Paste Values Only

Fortunately, both Windows and Apple have a keyboard shortcut to paste values only. Use this to paste in your text and only the text values will be pasted in, leaving all the hidden formatting behind.

Windows: Shift+Ctrl+V

Apple: Option+Cmd+Shift+V

Clear Formatting

Touch Stay has an icon on the text entry box toolbar to clear formatting. Highlight the formatted text and then look for the Clear Formatting icon.t’s on the second row of tools accessed from the 3 dots menu at the end of the first row

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How do I remove extra lines?

In some cases the line spacing may appear to be quite different from your source document, this is due to the different way that browsers, and other applications, present the two types of carriage return. Paragraph breaks have a larger space until the next line, whilst with a line break, the gap is smaller but often two or more line breaks may be used to create larger gaps between sections. If the gaps are not to your liking after pasting in, then delete them and replace with paragraph or line breaks accordingly. Touch Stay uses the same default behaviour as most other web and publishing applications. The Enter key alone will cause a paragraph break whilst Shift+Enter will insert a line break into your text. 

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