Cutting and pasting from other sources into Pages is what I do at least several times a day, and here’s how to make it easier in dealing with fonts and styles.
You can do two different things: either paste to match the style you have in the Pages document, or use a little program to strip all the formatting from what’s on the clipboard and then paste plain text into Pages.
The first way is a keyboard command that’s built into Pages. It’s Command-Option-Shift-V. What that does is paste into the current style, whatever it might be set at in Pages. So you can copy a bunch of text from a news web site in Safari, switch to Pages, and then hold down the Command-Option-Shift keys and hit the “V”. All the text will be in the font, style and size you have set in Pages.
If you still end up with some formatting you don’t like, the other way is to use a little program called Plain Clip. What Plain Clip does is strip all formatting from whatever text is on the clipboard. So you’d copy the text from Safari, double click on Plain Clip, and then you will have plain text on the clipboard that you can paste into a Pages document.
Plain Clip is what’s called a “faceless” program: there are no menus when it runs, so it runs fast and invisibly. You can leave the Plain Clip icon on your desktop where you can see and be able to double click on it, or put it in your Dock, where one click will run it.
Plain Clip does have a menu for setting a few different preferences, and you can get to it by holding down the shift key when you double click on it. You’ll see four different options: you can remove trailing spaces and tabs from each line; remove invisible control characters; remove line breaks; and replace runs of spaces with one space.
You’ll want to check them all except for maybe the third one, removing line breaks. That will remove any paragraph breaks, and you might want to keep paragraphs while stripping all other formatting.
Download Plain Clip free from Carsten Blüm: Mac Development