You may wish to check to see if the paragraph itself has italics enabled before pasting. Even though you may have deselected/turned off italics, Word (most versions) has the tendency of restoring the previous formatting to any text that is pasted there if no other text has been typed in in the interim.
A way to tell is to show paragraph marks (Ctrl + Shift + 8). From here, you will see that any new lines will have a paragraph symbol (it looks like a mirrored-'P' with two vertical lines supporting its spine).
Another possible way of avoiding this is, once you have a new line with NO formatting, simply enter a single space, and then paste your text in. This will cause Word to think that you have typed some content (which you have) and that you wish to proceed with the current formatting.
Lastly, you may wish to try 'Paste Special', which can be accessed via the shortcut menu on the 'Paste' button, or by pressing Alt GR + V. From here, select Unformatted Text and your text will be pasted in the most basic format. Even though you say that you have copied the text from Notepad - which I agree is the best way to ensure that text has no formatting - Word can still be a little unpredictable in its behaviour and the way it renders text from another application.
I hope one of these methods helps.
> It doesn't happen in programs like Word – say what? I'm sure this has to do with the way you "turn off" italics. What do you select before you disable italics? – slhck – 2012-05-02T20:23:29.720
When you say > turn off italics and paste the text with Ctrl+V again, are you turning it off by highlighting the entire line, or just the location after the originally pasted text? I'm not able to reproduce your problem – prrao – 2012-05-02T20:24:59.300
@slhck Oops, I meant Wordpad. – WorderWord – 2012-05-02T20:34:09.793
@prrao: I turn on italics by pressing the "I" button (or Control+I) and turn it off by doing the same thing. So basically, press the I button, paste the plain text, and it's italicized. Then immediately after, press the I button, paste the plain text again, and instead of being plain, it's also italicized -- and the "I" button is again highlighted, even though it wasn't prior to the last paste. This doesn't happen in Wordpad or Thunderbird. – WorderWord – 2012-05-02T20:36:43.723
Surely you're including a space after the first text is pasted? I noticed that if you turn off italics by doing
Ctrl+I, press space and then paste text, your problem exists. If you *reverse* the operation, however, i.e. turn off italics first and then use space and paste the second text, you get the same behavior as Wordpad or Thunderbird. Seems to be a silly styling nuance of Word – prrao – 2012-05-02T21:17:43.433No, I'm not pressing a space after. If I do, the second pasted text is indeed not italicized, but I'd like to have it not be italicized even if I don't add that space. I'm wondering if there's some setting or something in Word that I can configure to change the behavior? – WorderWord – 2012-05-03T03:20:02.630
If your cursor remains at the end of some text, Word doesn't yet know that the next block of text (without any space) has to have a different format, so it assigns it the same format as the previous block regardless of the format you try to assign. You can adjust the format of internal text after you finish all your cut-paste operations anyway. It's just a design principle in Word that we'll have to live with. Wordpad and Other lighter editors have much simpler implementations, so I guess you'll never see these kinds of problems there – prrao – 2012-05-04T02:56:29.797