 <p>Old question, but I found that the existing answers do not completely convert the text to plain. They seem to set the font to Helvetica and the size to 12.</p> <p>However, you can pipe <a href="https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/darwin/reference/manpages/man1/pbcopy.1.html" rel="nofollow">pbcopy and pbpaste</a> to really remove formatting.</p> <p>In the Terminal:</p> <pre><code>$ pbpaste | pbcopy </code></pre> <p>As an AppleScript:</p> <pre><code>do shell script "pbpaste | pbcopy" </code></pre> <p>That's it.</p>