PlainPaste— Markdown to plain text or rich text

Markdown to plain text or rich text

Paste an AI-drafted reply, a README or any Markdown into the input pane, then pick what you want out of it: plain text with the**,#and `gone, rich text that keeps its formatting when you paste it into Word, Gmail or Docs, or theHTML source. Copy it, download it, or save it as a PDF.

Nothing is thrown away by default — link URLs, code blocks and their language, image alt text, footnotes and your numbering all survive, so someone reading the output can still understand everything the original said.

Free online Markdown to plain text converter

Paste Markdown, choose Plain text, and the syntax characters come off: no **around bold text, no #before headings, no backticks around code. What remains is characters you can put in an email body, an applicant-tracking form, a ticket field or a chat box.

The part that matters is what survives. Ordered lists keep their numbers, including lists that begin at 7 and lists nested inside other lists. Nested bullets keep their indentation. Paragraph breaks stay where you put them. Tables become space-aligned columns instead of collapsing into one run-on line. A heading sits directly above the text it introduces rather than floating a blank line away from it.

Most converters get the first half right and the second half wrong, because the common libraries treat a list as decoration and flatten it. Numbering is usually the most important structure in the document — it is what tells a reader which answer belongs to which question — so it is preserved here rather than discarded.

Markdown to rich text for Word, Google Docs and Gmail

Plain text is the wrong answer when the destination is a document. ChooseRich text and Copy, and the clipboard receives the formatted version alongside a plain-text fallback. Paste into Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Gmail or Outlook and the headings are real headings, the lists are real lists, and the tables have real cells.

This works because a single copy can carry the same content in more than one format at once. The application you paste into picks whichever it understands — which is why the same copy arrives formatted in Word and as readable text in a terminal. Nothing is lost; two versions travel together.

Firefox gates the clipboard API that writes several formats, so there the rendered preview is selected for you and an ordinary copy keystroke carries the formatting instead. Images travel as references rather than data, so they render wherever their address is reachable.

Markdown to HTML converter

Choose HTML source to get the markup itself — semantic <h2>,<ul>,<table>and <pre>elements — ready to paste into a CMS, a template or an email builder. A Preview toggle renders the finished document so you can check it before you copy.

The HTML is sanitised before it is shown or handed over: script tags, inline event handlers and javascript:URLs are stripped. That matters because the input is whatever you pasted from somewhere else, and it is rendered live in the page.

The same output downloads as a self-contained.htmlfile with its styling written inline, so it opens correctly from a desktop with no network connection and no separate stylesheet to keep track of.

Markdown to PDF — free, and without uploading anything

Press Save as PDF and the formatted document goes to your browser print dialog, where "Save as PDF" is the destination. The page is printed rather than photographed, so the text in the resulting file stays selectable, searchable and copyable — and the file stays small.

Light or dark, on whatever paper you pick in the dialog. Dark inverts the page to black paper and white ink, leaving other colours alone. You can set a running header and footer that repeats on every page, carrying the document title and the time it was printed.

Nothing is uploaded to produce it. Every online Markdown-to-PDF service that renders server-side has your document on its server; this one has no server to send it to.

That is the whole of it: to convert Markdown to PDF online for free, paste the document and press the button. There is no upload step, no queue, no watermark, no sign-up and no cap on how many files you convert — which is most of what people are actually asking when they go looking for a free online Markdown-to-PDF converter.

Last reviewed August 2026 against current Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Markdown to PDF without VS Code, pandoc or Python

There are three well-known ways to turn Markdown into a PDF on your own machine, and all three are genuinely good — at different jobs. It is worth knowing which one you actually want before you install anything.

A VS Code extension such as Markdown PDF is the right answer if you already live in the editor and convert files constantly. It downloads its own copy of Chromium on first run, works on the file open in your workspace, and can be bound to a keystroke. The cost is a few hundred megabytes and an editor you have to be inside.

pandoc is the most capable of the three and the standard choice for academic writing: citations, cross-references, bibliographies, numbered figures and custom templates. For PDF output it hands off to a LaTeX engine, so you need a TeX distribution installed as well — several gigabytes for the full one. If you are producing a thesis or a paper, pay that price; nothing else comes close.

A Python pipeline — markdown ormarkdown2 to make HTML, then WeasyPrint to make the PDF — is the answer when a program, not a person, is doing the converting: nightly reports, generated invoices, a hundred files in a directory. It is scriptable and repeatable, and it is work to set up for a single document.

This page is for the fourth case, which is also the most common one: you have one document, you want a PDF now, and you would rather not install anything. Paste it, press Save as PDF, done — on any machine with a browser, with no admin rights and no package manager. The text in the file stays selectable because the page is printed rather than screenshotted, which is the same mechanism the VS Code extension uses.

Mermaid diagrams sit half inside that line. A ```mermaid fence is drawn as a real diagram in the rich-text preview, so you can read and check a flowchart here without installing anything. The PDF and the .html download are built from the Markdown separately, though, and in those the diagram is still its source text. If you need it drawn inside the exported file, that is the case for the VS Code extension with a Mermaid plugin, or mermaid-cli alongside pandoc.

A free Markdown viewer that needs no install on Mac or Windows

If all you want is to read a Markdown file — a README someone sent you, notes out of an app that exports .md, a changelog — you do not need a desktop application for it. Drop the file onto the input pane, or paste a GitHub or GitLab link into From URL, and switch the output to Rich text. That pane is a rendered view of the document: real headings, real lists, real tables, images loaded from their addresses.

Because it is a web page, the same thing works on macOS, Windows, Linux and ChromeOS without a separate download for each, and there is no version to keep updated. Nothing is uploaded to display it — the file is read by your own browser and stays on your machine.

To be clear about what this is not: it is a converter and a viewer, not a Markdown editor. There is no file tree, no save-back-to-disk, no live split-pane authoring with a cursor in the source and diffs on the right. You can absolutely type Markdown into the input pane and watch the rendered result change, and your text is remembered between visits — but if you are writing a long document you want a real editor, and if you are converting or reading one you are in the right place.

What is Markdown, and why does it need converting?

Markdown is a way of writing formatted text using ordinary characters. Wrap a word in asterisks and it means bold; start a line with a hash and it means heading; indent a line and it means a nested item. It was designed so that the source stays readable even before anything renders it, which is why it became the default for README files, documentation, note-taking apps and — most relevantly — the output of AI assistants.

The catch is that Markdown is a source format. It only becomes formatting when a program renders it. Your assistant's chat window renders it. Your email composer does not, and neither do most web forms, spreadsheet cells, ticket fields or chat inputs. In those places the syntax arrives as literal punctuation.

Converting is therefore a translation with real decisions in it: what does a heading look like when nothing can make it a heading? What does a table look like when there are no cells? Those questions have no single right answer, which is why this tool exposes them as settings and groups them into presets for the places text usually goes — an email, a report, a chat message, a documentation page, a web form.

It runs entirely in your browser using CommonMark plus the GitHub extensions — tables, strikethrough, task lists, autolinks and footnotes — so conversion is instant, works offline once loaded, and never sends your text anywhere.

What the converter changes, line by line

Markdown in

1. **Sessions attended:** 4 of 5
2. **Role this week:** Presenter

### Highlights

| Topic | Week |
| --- | --- |
| Sorting | 3 |

- Reviewed `binary_search` together
- [Docs](https://example.com)

```java
int total = a + b;
```

Plain text out

1. Sessions attended: 4 of 5
2. Role this week: Presenter

Highlights
Topic    Week
Sorting  3

- Reviewed binary_search together
- Docs (https://example.com)

[java]
int total = a + b;

Frequently asked questions about converting Markdown

Does my text get uploaded anywhere?: No. Every conversion runs in your browser with JavaScript. Nothing you paste is sent to a server, and the site has no backend to send it to — it is a set of static files on a CDN. The one time anything leaves your machine is if you use From URL, which fetches the address you typed.
Why does it keep my 1. 2. 3. numbering?: Because losing it is the single most annoying thing a converter can do. Most Markdown strippers flatten lists and the numbers disappear. If you are answering a numbered questionnaire, those numbers are the structure of your answer — so they stay, along with your indentation and line breaks, including lists that start at 7 and lists nested inside other lists.
What are the three output formats?: Plain text is bare characters — what a form field, a terminal or a plain-text email accepts. Rich text keeps the formatting through the clipboard: paste it into Word, Gmail or Google Docs and the headings, bold, lists, links and tables all arrive intact. HTML source gives you the markup itself, for a CMS or a template. Pick one from the Format menu in the output pane header.
Do the presets change the rich text as well, or only the plain text?: Both. Choosing a preset switches every setting, and the settings that describe the document rather than its characters apply to all three formats — links, images, code blocks, quotes, footnotes, heading case and punctuation. The ones that only shape characters, like which bullet glyph to use or how a table is laid out, have nothing to decide in HTML because a real element already exists, so those switch off when you leave plain text. The panel says which is which.
What happens to tables, images and links?: Tables become aligned columns by default, or tab-separated so they drop into spreadsheet cells, or "Label: value" lines for narrow places like an email. Links can keep just their text, show the URL in brackets, or become the bare URL. Images become their alt text or disappear. A code fence keeps its language as a label, so [java] tells the reader what they are looking at. All of it is a setting.
Does it ever throw part of my document away?: Not unless you ask it to. By default link URLs, code blocks and their language, image alt text, footnotes, horizontal rules and frontmatter all survive — the test being whether someone who never saw the input could understand everything it said from the output alone. One preset, Report & tables, deliberately strips code blocks and images because it exists to lift a comparison table into a report. The Default preset strips nothing at all.
What are the presets?: Six starting points: Default, Email reply, Report & tables, Chat message, Docs to plain text and Form field. Each switches every setting to what that destination needs, and loads a worked sample if the input pane is empty. Picking one never replaces text you have already put in — it only changes the settings. Adjust anything afterwards and your change sticks, and is remembered next visit.
Can I load a file or a GitHub link instead of pasting?: Yes. Upload a .md file, drag one onto the input pane, or use From URL. A GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket page address is rewritten to its raw equivalent automatically, so you can paste the link straight from your browser bar. That matters more than it sounds: a GitHub blob page serves HTML and carries no cross-origin header, so the address you copied cannot be read directly — only the raw one can.
How do I convert Markdown to PDF online for free?: Paste or drop the Markdown into the left pane, switch the output to rich text so you can see how it will look, then press Save as PDF and choose "Save as PDF" as the destination in the print dialog. That is the whole process — no account, no upload, no watermark and no limit on how many documents you convert. The conversion happens in your browser, so the file never leaves your machine, which is the part most free online converters cannot offer because they render on a server.
Do I need pandoc, a VS Code extension or Python to convert Markdown to PDF?: Not for this. Those are the usual answers, and they are good ones if you are already set up: pandoc with a LaTeX distribution gives the best typography available, and the VS Code Markdown PDF extension is convenient if you live in the editor. Both are installs, though — pandoc plus TeX Live is a multi-gigabyte download — and neither helps on a machine you cannot install software on, or on a phone. This page needs nothing but the browser you already have open. If you are producing a thesis, use pandoc. For a README, a report or an AI-drafted document, this is faster.
How does this compare with other free online Markdown to PDF converters in 2026?: The honest differences are these. It renders in your browser rather than on a server, so nothing is uploaded and there is no privacy question to think about. It prints through the browser, so the PDF has real selectable, searchable text rather than a picture of a page, and the file stays small. It costs nothing, has no account and no conversion limit. It also does three other jobs — plain text, rich text for pasting into Word or Gmail, and HTML — from the same pane, which the single-purpose converters do not. What it does not do is typeset like LaTeX: for a thesis or a journal paper, pandoc is still the right tool.
How do I get a PDF?: Press Save as PDF and choose "Save as PDF" as the destination in the print dialog that opens. The document is printed rather than turned into an image, so the text in the resulting file stays selectable and searchable. There is a Light/Dark selector: dark gives black paper and white ink, leaving other colours alone. Turn on "Background graphics" in the dialog or a dark PDF prints as a blank white page.
Can I put a header or footer on the PDF?: Yes — that is the stamping bay, below the conversion settings. Four fields: header left, header right, footer left, footer right, each with its own on/off toggle. Type anything, and use {title}, {date}, {time} or {datetime} for values filled in at the moment you print. It comes pre-configured with a footer carrying the document title and the time, so ignoring the panel still gives a sensible result. Five ready-made arrangements are there if you would rather pick one.
Why is there no page-number option in the stamping bay?: Because a browser cannot count pages inside a running header. The CSS that would do it, counter(page), only resolves inside @page margin boxes, and no major browser implements those. Offering a token that silently printed nothing would be worse than leaving it out. Your print dialog can add page numbers instead, under its own headers-and-footers option.
Which paper size does the PDF use?: Whichever one you pick in the print dialog. The document deliberately does not ask for a sheet size of its own, because once a page declares one Chrome treats the paper as already decided by the author and hides the Scale control along with it. Leaving it open means Paper size and Scale are both yours — A4, Letter, or anything else your printer offers, shrunk to fit if a table is too wide. Margins are still set by the document, so a running header or footer keeps its space whatever you choose.
Does it draw Mermaid diagrams?: Yes, in the rich-text preview. A ```mermaid code fence is rendered as a real diagram — flowcharts, sequence diagrams, Gantt charts and the rest — and there is a "Preview Mermaid diagrams" switch under the panes to turn it off and read the source instead. The renderer is loaded from this site rather than a CDN, and only when a document actually contains a diagram, so nothing is fetched from anywhere else and no one else sees your diagram. The HTML source view, the .html download and the PDF keep the code block as written.
Can I preview images and image links?: Yes. Images render inline in the rich-text preview, and a plain link pointing at a .png, .jpg, .svg or similar grows a preview underneath it, so a bare URL to a screenshot is something you can actually see. The "Preview images" switch under the panes turns both off, collapsing every image to a labelled chip carrying its alt text and address — useful when a document is full of remote images you would rather not load.
Can I see what the HTML will look like before I download it?: Yes. In HTML source mode there is a Preview toggle that renders the complete standalone document — the same file the download and the PDF produce. It runs in a fully sandboxed frame, so nothing in it can execute.
Are there keyboard shortcuts?: Yes, and they are VS Code's wherever VS Code has an opinion, because anyone converting Markdown all day already has those reflexes. Ctrl/Cmd+S downloads, Ctrl/Cmd+P saves as PDF, Ctrl/Cmd+Enter copies, Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+V cycles the output format, Ctrl/Cmd+B fits the output to the screen, Ctrl/Cmd+plus and minus resize it, Ctrl/Cmd+0 puts it back to 100%, F11 goes fullscreen and Escape comes back. Press Ctrl+H, Cmd+H or just ? for the full list, which is also printed under the converter. On a Mac the system takes Cmd+H to hide the window before the page sees it, so use Ctrl+H or ? there.
Why do the dropdowns not look like my system menus?: Because the system ones open in the wrong place. The menu a native select opens is drawn and positioned by the operating system rather than the page, and on macOS it is placed over the selected item rather than under the control — which, once the browser is zoomed, can put it hundreds of pixels away from the thing it belongs to. No stylesheet can move it, because the menu is not in the document at all. So the list is drawn in the page instead, directly under its control, on every platform. The real select is still there underneath holding the value, so nothing breaks if scripting is off.
What does Reset actually reset to?: To what this screen should have started at, not to one fixed number. A phone gets larger type than a laptop — held closer, but on a much smaller sheet of glass, and 13px monospace is tight there — and a large desktop panel gets larger type again because you sit further back from it. A tablet is told apart from a narrow desktop window by its pointer, not its width, since an iPad Pro in portrait is exactly as wide as a small laptop. The value is worked out fresh each time you press Reset, so it is right again after you rotate the device or resize the window.
Can I resize the panes or work fullscreen?: Both panes share one workspace with a divider you can drag — double-click it to return to a half-and-half split, or use the arrow keys once it has focus. There is a fullscreen button that takes the whole workspace to the full screen, and a "Fit output to screen" toggle floating over the output. That one is presenter mode: the output takes the whole workspace and everything around it goes — the Markdown pane, the toolbars, the footer — leaving the document and three small buttons that reset the size, go fullscreen and come back. The buttons fade out of the way once your pointer has been still, and return the moment you move over the pane. Escape leaves, whether you got there by button, by Ctrl/Cmd+B or from fullscreen. There is also a text-size control with its own reset, a zoom that works on all three output views, and a sync-scrolling toggle. Your text size, divider position and focus mode are remembered.
What else does it change besides removing the syntax?: By default it converts curly quotes, en and em dashes, ellipses, non-breaking spaces and invisible zero-width characters to plain ASCII, and collapses runs of blank lines. Those are the things that most often come through an AI-written draft and look wrong in a form field. Both are switches.
Which flavour of Markdown does it understand?: CommonMark plus the GitHub extensions: tables, strikethrough, task lists, autolinks and footnotes. YAML and TOML frontmatter are recognised, and kept or stripped depending on the setting.
Does it remember my settings?: Your input, conversion settings, chosen preset, output format, stamping bay fields, PDF theme, preview switches, text size, divider position, focus mode and light/dark preference are all kept in your browser localStorage. All of it stays on your device; clearing your browser site data removes it.
Is this the same as a Markdown preview or viewer?: It is both a viewer and a converter. Rich text is a rendered preview — real headings, lists, tables and images — so you can read a document you were sent. Plain text is the opposite job: the formatting is removed so you can paste the result somewhere that would not render it. Pick the output that matches what you are trying to do.
Can it convert Markdown to PDF with Mermaid diagrams?: Partly, and the distinction matters. A ```mermaid fence is drawn as a real diagram in the rich-text preview — there is a Mermaid switch in the output bar to turn that on and off. The PDF and the .html download are built from your Markdown separately, and in those the diagram is still its source text rather than a picture. So read and check the diagram here, but if you need it drawn inside the exported file, use the VS Code Markdown PDF extension with a Mermaid plugin, or mermaid-cli together with pandoc.
How is this different from the VS Code Markdown PDF extension, pandoc, or a Python library?: Mostly in what you have to install. The VS Code extension is best if you already work in that editor all day; it downloads its own Chromium. pandoc is the most powerful option and the right choice for academic output with citations and templates, but PDF export needs a LaTeX engine installed too. A Python pipeline such as markdown2 plus WeasyPrint is the right answer when a script converts files automatically rather than a person converting one. This page covers the remaining case: one document, a PDF right now, nothing installed, any machine with a browser.
Can I convert Markdown to a Word document?: You can get Markdown into Word, which is usually what the question means. Choose Rich text, press Copy, and paste into Word or Google Docs — headings, lists and tables arrive as real Word formatting rather than as asterisks. What it does not do is hand you a .docx file to download; the clipboard is the route. If you specifically need a .docx on disk, paste into Word and save, or use pandoc.
Is this a free Markdown editor?: No — it is a free converter and viewer, and calling it an editor would oversell it. You can type Markdown into the input pane and your text is remembered between visits, but there is no file tree, no saving back to disk and no authoring features. For writing a long document use a real editor; for converting or reading one, this is the shorter path.
Does it work on a Mac, and on Windows?: Both, plus Linux, ChromeOS and phones, because it is a web page rather than an installed application. Nothing to download for each platform, no admin rights needed, no version to keep updated, and no separate Mac and Windows builds that behave differently.
Is the PDF export actually free, or free until a watermark?: Actually free. There is no watermark, no page limit, no trial and no sign-up, and the PDF is produced by your own browser rather than by a service that could meter it. The site carries advertising; that is the whole business model.
Does it cost anything, or need an account?: Neither. No sign-up, no limit on how much you convert, no paid tier.