Plain Text Converter

The input box accepts formatted content, and the plain text appears as soon as you paste. There is no convert button.

1. Select and copy the content from Word, Google Docs, Outlook, a web page or any other source.
2. Click inside the Input box, which shows the hint Paste rich text here, and press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac). This keeps the structure of lists and tables.
3. Read the result in the box labelled Plain text.
4. Press Copy to use it, Download .txt to save it as a text file, or Use as input to continue editing.

The Paste button also works, but it reads only the plain text version from your clipboard, so use Ctrl+V when you want lists and tables recognised. The conversion runs on your device. Documents are not uploaded or stored, which matters when the source is a contract or an internal report.

It reads the pasted structure and writes each part as simple text.

A few limits are worth knowing. All runs of spaces and tabs inside text shrink to a single space, so the indentation of code blocks is lost. Nested lists are flattened, because the converter adds no indentation. Numbering starts again at 1 in each numbered list, and three or more blank lines in a row are reduced to one. Tab-separated tables paste neatly into a spreadsheet.

A short test shows the idea. Pasting a heading, a paragraph with a bold word and a link, and a two-item bulleted list gives a heading line, a blank line, one clean sentence with the link text only, another blank line and two lines that begin with a hyphen. Nothing in the result depends on the font or colour of the source, which is exactly why it pastes so cleanly into other programs.

Plain text is just the characters, with no instructions about how they should look. Rich text adds markup, visible or hidden, that describes fonts, sizes, colours, links and tables. Word documents, Google Docs and web pages are all rich text, and copying from them puts both the words and the markup on the clipboard.

Problems appear when the markup lands where it does not belong. A content management system may inherit a clashing font, an email may show white text on a white background, and a database may fill up with stray span tags. Plain text has none of these issues, is the smallest and most portable format, and opens on any device. It is a good choice for forms that reject rich text, for code and configuration, and for archiving a copy of a document.

If your text also contains fancy Unicode letters or curly quotes, the text formatting remover cleans those afterwards.

Most programs offer paste without formatting, usually Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac. It is worth knowing, but it has limits. Some programs ignore the shortcut, some keep hidden markup anyway, and lists often collapse into a single run of text.

This converter gives a predictable result and shows it to you before you use it, so you can edit the output box and then copy. After converting, the line break remover joins lines that were split by a PDF, the whitespace remover clears spacing, and the word counter measures the finished text. The Words, Characters and Lines figures under the Input box count what you pasted.