You're republishing content from a PDF in a different system. The original has heavy formatting — coloured headings, custom fonts, bold throughout. Pasting it into the new system carries all that across, and you have to clean it.
Stripping formatting at the PDF stage saves the cleanup later.
Why strip formatting
For reuse in CMSes, blog editors, or content tools that have their own styling. For pure text analysis. For documents going through translation that handles plain text better than styled.
Extract as plain text
Open the PDF in Flint's editor or use PDF to Word and save the Word doc as plain text. All styling — colours, fonts, bold, italics — drops out.
What survives: paragraph breaks, basic structure. What's lost: everything else.
For partial stripping
If you want some formatting (paragraphs, headings) but not others (colours, custom fonts), edit selectively in the editor before extracting.
Or extract to plain text and add back basic formatting in the destination tool.
FAQ
Will paragraph breaks be kept?
Yes, in most cases. Plain text preserves paragraph structure. Line wrapping may differ.
What about lists?
Bulleted lists usually come through as text with bullets characters. Numbered lists keep the numbers.
Will images be removed?
Yes — plain text extraction ignores images. Use image extraction separately if you want them.
Can I strip formatting from a scan?
Run OCR first to get text. Then strip formatting from the recognised text.
Plain text is the most portable format. Strip your PDF's formatting in Flint's editor or via PDF to Word.