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guideRemove formatting

The Remove format feature allows you to quickly remove any text formatting applied using inline HTML elements and CSS styles, like basic text styles (bold, italic, etc.), font family, size, and color and similar.

Note that block-level formatting (headings, images) and semantic data (links) will not be removed by this feature.

# Demo

Select the content you want to clean up and press the remove format button remove format in the toolbar:

You can use the remove format feature to easily clean up text formatting.

Some examples of the formatting removed by this feature: bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, code, subscript, superscript, font size as well as font family.

Remove format resets text alignment, too.

Note: The feature will not erase non-formatting content — your links are safe!

There are more CKEditor 5 features that can help you format your content:

# Configuring the remove format feature

This feature has no integration–level configuration. Once enabled, it works out–of–the–box with all core editor features.

# A short note about content types in the editor

The remove format feature is intended to help users tidy up chunks of content from unnecessary formatting. Each editor feature brings its own content types to the WYSIWYG editor. If you do not want the unnecessary formatting to be enabled in the first place, you may want to consider reducing the number of features enabled in the editor.

Doing that will spare the users the pain of manually removing formatting every time they paste content from other programs and make the editing experience smoother. The narrower set of editor features also gives you more control over the content saved to the database and prevents the accidental use of the types of content you would rather not store in your application.

# Integrating with editor features

To make it possible for the remove formatting feature to work with your custom content, you must first mark it in the schema. All you need to do is set the isFormatting property on your custom text attribute.

For instance, if you want the feature to remove links as well (not supported by default), you need to create a simple plugin that will extend the schema and tell the editor that the linkHref text attribute produced by the link feature is a formatting attribute:

// A simple plugin that extends the remove format feature to consider links.
function RemoveFormatLinks( editor ) {
    // Extend the editor schema and mark the "linkHref" model attribute as formatting.
    editor.model.schema.setAttributeProperties( 'linkHref', {
        isFormatting: true
    } );
}

Enable the RemoveFormatLinks plugin in the configuration and run the editor:

ClassicEditor
    .create( ..., {
        plugins: [
            RemoveFormat,
            RemoveFormatLinks,
            // ...
        ],
        toolbar: [
            'removeFormat',
            // ...
        ]
    } )

From now on, the the “Remove Format” button should also remove links in the content. Learn more about attribute properties.

# Installation

To add this feature to your rich-text editor, install the @ckeditor/ckeditor5-remove-format package:

npm install --save @ckeditor/ckeditor5-remove-format

And add it to your plugin list and the toolbar configuration:

import RemoveFormat from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-remove-format/src/removeformat';

ClassicEditor
    .create( document.querySelector( '#editor' ), {
        plugins: [ RemoveFormat, ... ],
        toolbar: [ 'removeFormat', ... ]
    } )
    .then( ... )
    .catch( ... );

Read more about installing plugins.

# Common API

The RemoveFormat plugin registers the 'removeFormat' UI button component and a command of the same name implemented by RemoveFormatCommand.

The command can be executed using the editor.execute() method:

// Removes all the formatting in the selection.
editor.execute( 'removeFormat' );

We recommend using the official CKEditor 5 inspector for development and debugging. It will give you tons of useful information about the state of the editor such as internal data structures, selection, commands, and many more.

# Contribute

The source code of the feature is available on GitHub in https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/tree/master/packages/ckeditor5-remove-format.