Plain Text Converter — Free Online Tool
What is Plain Text Converter?
The Plain Text Converter is the ultimate digital solvent, stripping away all invisible formatting, rich-text styling, hyperlinks, and weird font declarations from your clipboard. When you copy text from Microsoft Word, a PDF, or a highly styled webpage, you aren't just copying words; you are copying a heavy payload of hidden CSS, bolding, italics, and font sizes.
Pasting this directly into an email or CMS often breaks the layout. This tool acts as an airlock, sanitizing the text into pure, unstyled ASCII/Unicode characters so it conforms perfectly to its new destination.
When to use Plain Text Converter?
Use this tool whenever you are copying text from a rich-text environment (Word, Google Docs, a webpage) into a system that is highly sensitive to formatting, such as a WordPress block, an email marketing template (Mailchimp), or a corporate database. Writers use it to clean up messy drafts before publishing.
It is a more robust, generalized version of the Remove HTML Tags tool. By passing your text through here, you ensure it inherits the clean, default styling of wherever it is ultimately pasted.
How to use this tool
- 1Paste your formatted text or HTML
- 2Click 'Convert to Plain Text'
- 3Copy the clean, stripped result
If you are on a desktop computer, you can often achieve a similar result by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V (Windows) or Cmd+Shift+V (Mac) to 'Paste as Plain Text' directly into your application.
Examples
| Input | Output |
|---|---|
| <b>Bold</b> and <em>italic</em> text | Bold and italic text |
| Text withinvisiblechars | Text with invisible chars (removed) |
| (Word document paste) | Clean text without Word formatting |
| Text with non-breaking spaces | Text with regular spaces |
| (Rich text email) | Plain text version of the email |
Rules & Behavior
- All visual styling—including bold, italics, underlines, colors, and font-family declarations—is immediately destroyed.
- Hyperlinks are deactivated. The display text of the link remains, but the underlying destination URL and clickability are stripped away.
- Invisible formatting characters, unpredictable tab spaces, and hidden HTML payloads attached to the clipboard data are scrubbed.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is 'plain text'?
Plain text is data consisting entirely of basic characters (letters, numbers, punctuation) with absolutely no formatting metadata. It contains no instructions for what font to use, what size the text should be, or what color it is. It is the raw data of writing, universally readable by any computer system on earth.
Why shouldn't I just paste my text from Word into WordPress?
Microsoft Word attaches a massive amount of invisible, proprietary XML and formatting code to the text you copy. When you paste that into a web CMS like WordPress or a marketing email, that hidden code often clashes with the website's CSS, causing chaotic fonts, broken margins, and layout bugs. Converting to plain text first prevents this.
Does this tool delete my hyperlinks?
Yes. The active, clickable hyperlink URL is completely stripped away. The visible 'anchor text' (the words you actually clicked on) remains in the sentence, but it will no longer function as a link. You will need to manually re-link any important text in your final destination.
Will I lose my line breaks and paragraphs?
No. Standard structural elements like single spaces and line breaks (hard returns) are standard text characters and are preserved. The tool strips visual styling, not physical sentence structure. If you need to clean up line breaks, use the Remove Line Breaks tool.
Is there a keyboard shortcut for this?
Yes! Most modern browsers and operating systems support a 'Paste as Plain Text' shortcut. On Windows, try Ctrl+Shift+V. On Mac, try Cmd+Shift+V. If that shortcut is intercepted by the software you are using, then this web-based converter is your most reliable fallback.