Markdown to Plain Text

The converter handles CommonMark specification with extensions for tables (GitHub Flavored Markdown) and strikethrough. It works with most standard Markdown including ATX headers, Setext headers, fenced code blocks, indented code blocks, blockquotes, ordered/unordered lists, horizontal rules, links, images, emphasis, code spans, and tables. Some specialized flavors like MultiMarkdown or Markdown Extra features (definition lists, abbreviations, footnotes) may not be fully supported.

Table alignment in plain text depends on using a monospace font. The converter calculates column widths and pads cells with spaces, but this only aligns correctly when every character has equal width. If viewing in a proportional font (like most email clients or rich text editors), columns won't line up. Copy the output into a code editor, terminal, or plain text email set to monospace to see proper alignment.

This tool only converts Markdown to plain text. For the reverse operation, you'd need a different tool that detects structure in plain text (like headers from ALL CAPS lines, lists from leading dashes) and wraps with Markdown syntax. That requires heuristic guessing about intent and is inherently less reliable than stripping known syntax.

Strip removes the URL entirely, leaving only the link text — best when URLs are distractions. Footnote preserves accessibility by converting [text](url) to text [1] and appending a numbered reference list at the bottom — ideal for academic, legal, or print documents where source attribution matters. Keep preserves the original Markdown link syntax if you need to re-process later.

Reference-style links like [text][id] with a separate [id]: url definition require two-pass parsing to resolve. This converter processes single documents in one pass and doesn't maintain a reference dictionary. Convert reference links to inline [text](url) format first, or the tool will flag them as potentially unsupported syntax.

The converter intentionally strips or escapes HTML tags since they aren't plain text. If you need HTML preserved, this tool isn't the right choice — it specifically targets clean text extraction. For HTML-to-text conversion, use a dedicated HTML parser that handles tag semantics (like <p> adding blank lines, <br> becoming newlines).

The web interface handles one document at a time. For batch processing, you could use the underlying open-source algorithm (if published) or pipe files through a command-line tool like pandoc -t plain or markdown-it with a plain text renderer. The live preview nature of this tool makes it optimized for interactive editing rather than bulk operations.

Code fence info strings (```javascript) are intentionally removed because they're Markdown-specific metadata. The fence markers themselves remain to visually distinguish code from prose, but javascript, python, etc. are stripped as formatting. If you need language identifiers in plain text, add them as comments inside the code block before conversion.

There's no hard limit, but browser memory constrains practical use. Documents under 1MB (roughly 500 pages of text) process instantly. Very large files (10MB+) may cause UI lag during live typing — paste large documents rather than typing, or disable live preview by working in stacked mode with auto-update off if that were an option.

Yes — the parser is Unicode-aware and handles non-ASCII text correctly. Headers, lists, and emphasis markers are ASCII symbols (#, *, -) that delimit content regardless of language. The only caveat is that CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) text has different word boundary rules; the word count uses space-splitting which may undercount CJK characters. Character counts remain accurate for all languages.

The provided options cover the most common needs: bullet characters, link handling, header underlines, list indentation, text wrapping, and strikethrough style. For deeper customization (custom replacement rules, regex-based transformations, template-based output), you'd need to post-process the result or modify the open-source implementation if available.

Text wrapping applies to paragraphs (runs of text separated by blank lines) but preserves literal line breaks in the original. If your Markdown has hard line breaks (two spaces at end of line, or <br> tags), those convert to \n and aren't re-wrapped. Code blocks, tables, and blockquotes also bypass wrapping to preserve their structure. Only flowing prose paragraphs get re-flowed to your specified width.