Markdown to Plain Text

You wrote a long doc in Markdown for a code editor that supports it, and now you're pasting it into a context that doesn't — an email, a non-technical colleague's review, a job application form that strips formatting. The result is a wall of asterisks, underscores, and broken link syntax.

The converter strips the formatting characters and leaves you with readable plain text. Bold and italic markers vanish. Links collapse to either the link text or the URL (configurable). Code blocks become indented paragraphs. Bullet lists keep their bullets as plain text. Headers lose their hash marks but keep the line breaks above and below them. Images get replaced with their alt text in brackets. The output isn't pretty, but it's at least readable in a context that doesn't render Markdown.

The processing rules: Markdown's syntax is mostly punctuation overlays on plain text, so stripping is straightforward. Asterisks, underscores, and tildes around words (bold, italic, strikethrough) are removed; the wrapped text remains. Hash marks at line starts (headers) are stripped; the rest of the line stays. Backticks for inline code are removed. Triple-backtick code blocks have their fences removed; the code itself is preserved as monospace-friendly indented text. Bullet markers (-, *, +) are kept as-is in a plain-text list. Numbered lists keep their numbers. Block quotes lose their > prefix but keep the indentation. Tables get reformatted into roughly-aligned columns that render passably in monospace fonts.

A worked example: input "# Project Update\n\n**Summary**: We shipped the *new feature* on time. See [release notes](https://example.com/notes) for details.\n\n- Database migration completed\n- New UI deployed\n- Monitoring active". Output: "Project Update\n\nSummary: We shipped the new feature on time. See release notes for details.\n\n- Database migration completed\n- New UI deployed\n- Monitoring active". The structure is preserved enough to be readable; the link text is kept and the URL is dropped (or appended in parentheses, depending on settings). The hash mark turned into nothing — the line break above and below the heading does the work of separating it from body text.

Where this is genuinely lossy: tables and code blocks suffer the most. A complex table with column alignment looks fine in rendered Markdown and ugly in plain text without monospaced fonts. Code blocks lose syntax highlighting and language hints, which often makes them harder to read. Image references become bracketed alt text, which loses information. For destinations that strip formatting (job application portals, certain email clients), this is the best you can do; for destinations that support some formatting (HTML email, modern email clients), consider rendering to HTML instead. The converter targets plain-text-only destinations where Markdown's formatting characters would be visible noise rather than rendered structure.