Converting to plain text should not alter formatting in any way

We were just burned this morning when we converted references to plain text before spliting an Office 2007 Word document for a grant application.  These documents have very specific formatting (e.g. .5 margins, exact 12 pt spacing, etc.)  When we converted to plain text it copied the text to a new document, margins and paragraph spacing were lost and worst of all, figures and legends were jumbled.

I think most of the formatting issues were caused by copying the contents to a new document.  This option should allow you to do the change in the current document, with a warning stating that future formatting will not be possible.

PLEASE FIX THIS.

Yes, I never use Endnote’s tool for this.  I always just use the unlink fields option from Word.  (select all and Ctrl-Shift-F9)

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Well, is that the issue of Endnote? I don’t understand. I think it is the issue about the difference between “coy unformatted” versus “copy” which retains fonts/spacing etc. in MS Word.

Can you please tell us the exact version and platform of EndNote and Word you are using? The problem you describe was an issue at one point but should have been fixed for several years/versions now.

Thanks,

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team

Have this exact problem - X7.1 Bld 7705. Really annoying.

I have just encountered the problem with EndNote 7.3 running from within Word 2007 on Windows XP SP3. I clicked on Update Citations and Bibliography, then Convert to Plain Text. For some reason, EndNote took it upon itself, when copying the resulting file to a new document, to renumber all my endnotes from Arabic numbers to lowercase Roman ones, in addition to changing my zoom setting. After reading this thread, I selected the entire document and clicked Ctrl+Shft+F9, but to no avail; the grey highlighting was still there. Since my document contains endnotes rather than footnotes, I selected only the endnotes and clicked Ctrl+Shft+F9, whereupon EndNote agreed to do its job correctly. I don’t know what would have happened if my document had contained footnotes; it could be that I would have had to click inside each formatted citation and issue the command. Though my editor did not ask me to carry out this operation, I feel that it is good practice to do so, because editors and typesetters might be annoyed or bothered by the grey highlights, which are not part of a standard document. Publishers who are very “sophisticated” will always prefer files with very little formatting. Obviously, one ought to wait until the very last moment to untie a document completely from EndNote and work on a copy rather than on the original file.

@jasonr wrote:

Can you please tell us the exact version and platform of EndNote and Word you are using? The problem you describe was an issue at one point but should have been fixed for several years/versions now.

According to this EndNote article, this issue is supposed to have been fixed since EndNote X1 – but it’s still present in EndNote X9 on macOS Mojave (10.14.6) for me.

Choosing “Convert to plain text” consistently creates a new document with absolutely no formatting, styles or anything. It basically copies the text from the document and inserts it as plain, unformatted text into a new document based on the default template.

This worked perfectly for me. Thanks for sharing.