Hey — my first FQ thread! Woo-hoo! 
I used to have an app (iOS) that stripped out any formatting and images and left only the text characters remaining. Is there still such an app? I must’ve deleted the old app.
I’ve searched a bit but keep getting texting apps, for text message communications. Not what I want.
Maybe a note-taking app?
On a PC. You can paste into a text editor like Notepad and you’re left with just the ASCII characters.
I am certain there is an app, but you did not mention what was the format of the original file. For example, for PDF files there is pdftotext (& variations on this name). Or try one of the dragging or selecting gestures mentioned here: How to Get Text from PDF on iPhone and iPad with iOS 15
I think the specific concept you are looking for is plain text.
If I Google plain text converter iOS, I get a lot of results that seem to resemble what you’re looking for. Such as:
(Not that I’ve ever used that app myself.)
Microsoft Word has (or once had?) a menu option for that. When you copy text to one of Word’s internal clipboards, all formatting is preserved with it. But when you paste the same text somewhere else (within Word), there are two paste options – one that includes the formatting and one that removes all that.
It’s still in there. When you right-click where you want to paste, you’re given several options (depending on the clipboard content) and one of them is ‘keep text only’ which will paste the text in to match your current in-document formatting.
The suggestion upthread to paste into Notepad is pretty effective too and is something I do frequently. Not an operation I’ve tried performing on my phone so I’ve never researched methods for doing so. That being said, there is an MS Word smartphone app, and it also has the same pasting options.
Yes this is exactly it. Thank you!
And — hey! This was the exact app I used years ago. Double thank you!!
Thanks, Hoops! All net from 45 feet — swish!
(Hmm, I’m assuming your uName is a basketball reference, but that may not be the case…)
On my laptop I do this all the time. I find it very handy.
Oh, interesting! I never knew Word had this option. I’ll have to explore it.
This article is very informative. Good tips here. Thank you!
More: the problem is that in iOS all the note taking apps that I tried retained images, which I wanted stripped out.
Who even knows what “plain text” means any more? I’m an old school computer user, from the days when plain text was all there was. I have always had a lot of occasions to deal with plain text. (Which I now often refer to as “plain old plain text”.) And there are soooo many computer users these days who have no idea what that means.
Well why didn’t you just say so? 
Exactly!
To close the loop on this, on my iPhone I downloaded the app called Old Notepad and it’s been working very well.
