“Formatted paste” feature for text editors

“Formatted paste” feature for preserving bold, italics and underlining formatting in text pasted into a plain text document, using the plain-text formatting conventions *bold*, /italics/ and _underlining_

Say you’ve copied some text from something like a Word document or a PDF document that contained bold, italics or underlining formatting. If you want to paste that into a text editor, you lose that formatting.

The “Formatted paste” feature would preserve it, using the common plain text conventions for representing such formatting: asterisks for bold text (like this: *bold text*), forwards slashes for italics (like this: /italicized text/) and underscores for underlining (like this: _underlined text_).

For example, the “Formatted paste” would automatically put underscores around bits of text that were originally underlined.

If you're wondering, I just suggested this feature to the makers of the two Text Editors I use TextPad and NoteTab.