Convert Markdown to Plain Text
Free online converter for Markdown files. Unformatted UTF-8 text. Nothing to install, no watermark, and every file is deleted automatically.
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Upload a Markdown file to convert it to Plain Text. Up to 3 files at once, 100 MB each.
Free · up to 3 files · 100 MB each · files deleted automatically after 1 hour.
About MD and TXT
Markdown .md
Plain text with a light, readable convention for headings, links and emphasis. It stays legible as text while converting cleanly to formatted output.
Good for
- Readable as-is, with or without a renderer
- Diffs and version-controls well
- Converts cleanly to HTML, PDF and word processor formats
Trade-offs
- No fine layout control
- Several competing dialects for tables and footnotes
- Complex documents outgrow it
text/markdown
Plain Text .txt
Just characters. No fonts, no sizes, no layout — which is exactly why it will still open, unchanged, in fifty years.
Good for
- Universally readable, now and indefinitely
- Tiny, and works with every text tool ever written
- Nothing hidden — what you see is the whole file
Trade-offs
- No formatting, images or structure whatsoever
- Character encoding must be right or accents break
- Line endings differ between Windows and everything else
text/plain
MD and TXT side by side
| MD | TXT | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | None — plain text | None |
| Animation | No | No |
| Typically used for | Documentation, notes, README files | Notes, logs, source data, long-term archives |
What changes when you convert MD to TXT
Read as UTF-8
A MD is a text file, and a text file does not record which encoding it uses — that is the one thing the format cannot tell you about itself. We read it as UTF-8, which is right for essentially anything produced this decade. A file saved long ago in a regional encoding can arrive with accented characters mangled, and the fix is to re-save it as UTF-8 before converting rather than after. Tabs and spaces used to line columns up will also shift once the text is set in a proportional typeface.
Only the words survive
TXT stores characters and nothing else, so fonts, sizes, colours, images, tables and page layout are all dropped. What you get back is the text itself — which is the point when you want the content free of the formatting around it.
The shorthand is stripped
Markdown is already readable as plain text, so this is a gentle conversion: the syntax that marked up headings, emphasis and links is removed, and the words are left. Links lose their destinations, since a text file has nowhere to keep them — if the URLs matter, convert to HTML instead.
Other Markdown conversions
Other ways to get Plain Text
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