TruePaste

Your words, without hidden surprises.

Text copied out of a chat window picks up passengers: characters you cannot see, cannot select, and cannot delete. They survive every copy and paste and ride along into your email, your essay, your pull request.

Some are harmless formatting. Some carry a tracking marker or a watermark. Some carry an instruction meant for the next AI assistant that reads your text.

TruePaste finds them, decodes what they were carrying, and takes them out.

• Runs entirely on your device. No upload, no account, no limits.
• The page cannot phone home. Its Content Security Policy sets connect-src 'none', which your browser enforces.
• The extension asks for no site access when you install it.
• MIT licensed, no dependencies, and small enough to read in one sitting.

Try it

Open the website, or clone and run it locally:

git clone https://github.com/itstejaswi/truepaste.git
cd truepaste
npm run dev          # http://localhost:8080

Install the extension

Chrome and Edge only allow one-click installation from their own stores, and both refuse .crx files from anywhere else. Loading unpacked is the supported route for an extension distributed as source - and it means the code you run is the code you can read.

1. Download truepaste-<version>.zip from Releases.
2. Optionally verify it against the published SHA-256:

   Get-FileHash truepaste.zip -Algorithm SHA256   # Windows
   shasum -a 256 truepaste.zip                    # macOS, Linux

3. Unzip it somewhere permanent - the browser reloads from that folder at every start.
4. Open chrome://extensions or edge://extensions, enable Developer mode, choose Load unpacked, and select the folder.

Right-click any selection for Clean selected text, or press Ctrl+Shift+V for the popup.

What it removes

Security-relevant, on by default:

Artefact	Why it matters
Tag characters U+E0000-E007F	An invisible mirror of the entire ASCII range. Hides IDs, watermarks or whole instructions inside ordinary sentences.
Variation selectors U+FE00-FE0F, U+E0100+	Legitimate after emoji. Attached to letters they encode arbitrary bytes - the documented way to watermark text.
Bidi controls U+202A-202E, U+2066-2069	Reorder rendered text independently of its real order. The Trojan Source attack (CVE-2021-42574).
Zero-width characters U+200B, U+2060, U+FEFF	Render as nothing, break search and regex, and are the most common carrier for hidden markers.
Out-of-place joiners U+200C, U+200D	Removed only where they serve no linguistic purpose (see below).
Control characters	C0 and C1 controls other than tab, newline and carriage return.

Formatting, mostly opt-in: unusual spaces, line separators U+2028/U+2029, dashes, smart quotes, ellipses, leftover markdown, padded blank lines, and look-alike letter mapping.

What it cannot remove

Statistical watermarks such as SynthID-Text are embedded in token selection - the choice of words - not in the characters. No amount of character cleaning touches them.

Tools that promise to defeat AI detectors are describing a different problem. Detectors work on perplexity and burstiness, so TruePaste will not change what they conclude. It removes hidden data and metadata; it does not rewrite prose.

Script safety

Zero-width joiners and variation selectors are simultaneously a smuggling channel and a hard requirement of several writing systems. Tools that strip them unconditionally corrupt emoji families, Devanagari conjuncts and Arabic ligatures.

TruePaste decides per occurrence. A joiner between two Latin letters is a payload; the same character inside 👨‍👩‍👦 or क‍ष is doing real work and is left alone. When context is ambiguous, the character stays - a sanitiser that silently damages valid text is worse than one that leaves a little noise.

The test suite covers this explicitly. See tests/core.test.mjs.

Using the core directly

The engine has no dependencies and no build step.

import { clean, detect } from './js/core/clean.js';

const { text, report, changed } = clean(input);
console.log(report.total);              // how many artefacts were removed
console.log(report.payloads.tagText);   // any hidden message, decoded

const scan = detect(input);             // inspect without modifying

Every rule is a toggle:

clean(input, { rules: { dashes: true, quotes: true, markdown: false } });

Layout

js/core/      the engine - codepoints, script safety, rules, clean/detect
js/web/       website controller and the selection overlay
extension/    MV3 shell; the build copies js/core into it
tests/        node --test, no framework
tools/        dev server, logo generator, extension build

js/core has exactly one home. The build copies it into the extension, so the website and the extension can never drift apart.

Development

npm test                              # run the test suite
npm run dev                           # serve the site locally
node tools/build-extension.mjs --zip  # build and package the extension
node tools/make-logo.mjs              # regenerate icons from source

No build step, no bundler, no dependencies. The repository contains no opaque binary assets: the icons are generated by a script you can read.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.