The Sizing Mismatch
Google Docs strives to be a seamless hub for compiling information from various sources. However, its copy-and-paste behavior is often too literal. When you paste text copied from an external source—like a PDF, a heavily stylized website, or even another word processor—Google Docs brings the source formatting with it by default. Crucially, this includes the exact font size. If your document is written in a standard 11-point font, and you paste a headline copied from a news site, Google Docs will automatically insert that text at a massive 24-point font size, completely disrupting your document’s visual flow and forcing you to manually resize the new text.
Forcing Size Conformity
To ensure your document looks professional and stop Google Docs from automatically changing the font size when you paste external content, you must intercept the standard clipboard behavior.
You cannot toggle off this behavior in the standard settings menu; you must change how you execute the paste command itself. When you use the standard Ctrl+V (or Cmd+V), you paste both the text and its invisible formatting data. To force the incoming text to instantly adopt the exact font size (and color and font family) of the paragraph you are pasting it into, you must use the “paste without formatting” shortcut. Click your cursor exactly where you want the text to go. Instead of a normal paste, press Ctrl+Shift+V on a Windows PC or Chromebook, or Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac. Google Docs will strip away the massive 24-point sizing data and insert the text perfectly matched to your document’s current 11-point standard.