About PlainPaste
Chat assistants answer in Markdown. Email clients, ATS forms, job portals and most chat boxes do not render it. So a reply that looked clean in the assistant arrives full of**and#characters. PlainPaste is the one step in between.
How it works
Paste on the left, choose an output format, read the result on the right, press Copy. The output updates as you type, so you can see what a setting does before you commit to it.
Three ways out
- Plain text
- Bare characters, for a form field, a terminal or a plain-text email. Numbered lists keep their numbers, nested lists keep their indentation, tables stay laid out as columns, and headings sit directly above the text they introduce.
- Rich text
- Keeps its formatting through the clipboard — paste into Word, Gmail or Google Docs and the headings, bold, lists, links and tables all arrive intact.
- HTML source
- The markup itself, for pasting into a CMS or a template.
Taking it with you
Copy puts the current format on the clipboard. Download saves a.txtin plain mode, or a self-contained.htmlfile with its styling built in — it opens correctly with no network connection.Save as PDF opens your browser's print dialog on the formatted document; choose "Save as PDF" as the destination. The text in that PDF stays selectable and searchable.
Nothing is thrown away
By default the output keeps everything the input said: the URL behind a link, the contents of a code block and which language it was written in, the alt text of an image, footnotes, and a horizontal rule where you drew one. Someone reading the output who never saw the original should still be able to follow all of it. Each of those is a setting, so you can switch any of them off when you want something barer.
Presets
Plain text is not one thing. Text going into a spreadsheet cell wants tab-separated table rows; the same table in an email wants readable label-and-value lines. So each preset loads a worked sample together with the settings that destination needs:
- Default
- Lossless general purpose — the settings everything else starts from
- Email reply
- Answering a numbered questionnaire in an email client
- Report & tables
- Comparison tables as aligned columns, with code and images stripped out
- Chat message
- Slack, Teams or WhatsApp, where links need to be visible
- Docs to plain text
- A README or technical page, keeping code and column alignment
- Form field
- Application portals that reject anything but bare characters
Pick the closest one, then change whatever you like in Conversion settings — your changes stick, and are remembered next time you visit.
What it does not do
- It does not convert plain text or HTML back into Markdown.
- It does not edit — the output pane is a result, not a document you work in.
- It does not have accounts, history, or a server that sees your text.
Keyboard
- Ctrl / ⌘ + Enter — copy the output in whichever format is selected
- Drag a
.mdfile onto the left pane to load it