Markdown to Plain Text

Markdown is a light way of writing formatting with ordinary characters: # for a heading, **double asterisks** for bold, - for a list item. In apps that understand it, those characters disappear and the formatting appears. Everywhere else they stay visible. Paste an answer from ChatGPT into an email, a README into a form or Obsidian notes into a text message, and you get asterisks, hashes and brackets. This tool turns Markdown into the clean text a reader expects.

Text, not a search and replace

Deleting every asterisk and hash would also delete the ones that belong to the text, such as 5 * 3 or “#1 seller”, and would leave link addresses and table pipes behind. Instead, the Markdown is parsed the way a Markdown app reads it, using GitHub’s flavour of Markdown, and the plain text is written from that structure. Escaped characters, such as \* written to show a literal asterisk, come out as the character itself.

What each element becomes

Headings become lines of their own. Bold, italic, strikethrough and inline code lose their marks but keep their words. Code blocks keep their content exactly, and blockquotes lose the > marks. A horizontal rule becomes a short separator. Raw HTML tags inside the Markdown are removed and HTML entities are decoded.

Lists and task lists

Bulleted lists get the bullet of your choice, or none. Numbered lists keep their numbers, starting where the original list starts, and nested lists are indented under their parent item. Task list items keep a [x] or [ ] so a checklist still reads as a checklist.

Tables

Each table row becomes one line. Cells are separated by tabs, which lets you paste the result straight into a spreadsheet, or by vertical bars if the text is meant to be read.

Links and images

Links can be reduced to their text, which suits most emails and forms, written with the address in brackets after the text, or turned into numbered references listed at the end. Images normally vanish; keep their description in square brackets if it carries meaning. Linked images are never downloaded.

Plain text or formatted text?

Plain text is right for forms, text messages, code comments, subtitles and systems that only accept text. If you want the bold and the headings to survive, paste into Word or Google Docs from a rendered preview instead: write or paste the Markdown in the Markdown Editor and copy from its preview, or create a document with Markdown to PDF.

Private

The conversion happens in your browser and nothing is uploaded.

A worked example

A chat answer with the heading “Steps” followed by a numbered list whose first item is “Open the file” and whose second item links the word Export to https://example.com/help becomes the line “Steps”, an empty line, then “1. Open the file” and “2. Click Export”. With links set to “Text (https://…)”, the second step reads “2. Click Export (https://example.com/help)”, so the address is still there for a reader who needs it.

Checking the output

Read the first lines of the result next to the original: headings should stand alone, list numbers should match and nothing should still contain asterisks or brackets. If a symbol remains, it was most likely written as an escaped character on purpose, or belongs to an extension such as footnotes that plain Markdown does not define.

Related tools

Remove tags from HTML with Strip HTML Tags and tidy spacing and line breaks with the Text Cleaner.