Convert LinkedIn Styled Text Back to Plain Text

The editor above is a small version of our LinkedIn post formatter that does the reverse of its usual job. It needs no account and works in any current browser.

1. Paste the styled text. Copy it from a LinkedIn post, comment or profile, from an email, or from a document, and paste it into the editor. Bold or fancy letters appear exactly as they did at the source.
2. Press Remove formatting. Every styled letter is swapped for its plain equivalent. The preview beside the editor updates straight away, so you can compare the result with what you pasted.
3. Copy the plain text. Press Copy and paste the result wherever you need it: a new post, a spreadsheet, an application form, a search box.

If the Remove formatting button looks greyed out for a moment after the page opens, the editor is still loading. It switches on by itself within a second or two.

Styled text looks like formatting, but it is not. When someone makes a LinkedIn headline bold with a generator, each letter is replaced by a different character from a Unicode block that mathematicians use for symbols. The letter you see as a bold H is really the character called Mathematical Sans-Serif Bold Capital H. To a computer it has nothing in common with a plain H apart from its shape.

That difference causes trouble in three places.

Search cannot find it

Search tools generally match characters, not shapes, so LinkedIn search, recruiter searches, web search engines and the find command in your browser can all miss styled text. If your headline says Marketing Manager in styled letters, a search for the plain words may not match it. The same is true when you paste styled text into a spreadsheet and try to filter for a word. Each styled word is a string of unusual characters that may not match anything you would type.

Screen readers handle it unevenly

Assistive software reads characters by name or by value, and the result varies between readers and platforms. Some announce a long phrase such as “mathematical bold capital h” for a single letter, some read the underlying letter, and some stay silent. A short styled phrase is a small cost for a reader to absorb. A paragraph of it can be unreadable. Our bold text guide covers when a little emphasis is worth that cost.

Other software may not display it

Fonts that include the mathematical alphabets are standard on current phones and computers, but older systems, some email clients and some corporate tools show empty boxes or question marks instead. Plain letters work everywhere.

Turning the text back into ordinary letters removes all three problems at once. You keep the words and lose the risk.

Most people arrive here with a specific job in mind. These are the most common ones.

Editing a post you want to reuse

You saw a post with a structure you like, or you wrote a styled draft months ago and want to rework it. Editing letter by letter in styled text is awkward, because your keyboard types plain letters and the result mixes two kinds in one word. Unformat first, rewrite, then style again with the font generator once the wording is final.

Fixing a headline that stopped working

A styled headline is searchable only to people who can type the same look-alike characters, which is nobody. If you want your profile to turn up for the job title you hold, put that title in plain letters. Convert the headline here, paste it back, and then add emphasis with a single styled word or a symbol from the symbols page rather than styling the whole line.

Pasting into an applicant tracking system

A resume summary copied from a styled LinkedIn About section arrives as look-alike characters, and a form or recruiting system that matches keywords may not recognise them. Clean the text here before it goes into any form.

Copying text into another tool

Spreadsheets, CRMs, email subject lines, calendar invites and code editors all treat styled letters as unusual symbols. Plain text sorts, filters and matches the way you expect.

Checking how long a post really is

LinkedIn appears to count UTF-16 code units rather than visible characters. Most styled letters take two code units, while plain letters take one, so styled text can use up the limit faster than it looks. A few styled letters that Unicode places in other blocks, such as script B or e, take one. The UTF-16 figure in the character counter shows the number to compare against the limit.

Every styled letter in the supported alphabets has exactly one plain counterpart. The converter keeps a table of those pairs, built from the same data the formatter uses to create styled text, and walks through your text one visible character at a time. When a character is a styled letter or digit from the table, it is replaced with the plain letter or digit. Other characters from the same Unicode mathematical block, such as bold script, bold Fraktur or Greek styles, are converted through their standard Unicode decomposition. Anything outside that block is left exactly as it was.

Two details are worth knowing.

Letters with holes. Unicode leaves a few slots empty inside its mathematical alphabets, because the letter already existed elsewhere. Script capital B, for example, lives in the Letterlike Symbols block, and a few Fraktur and double-struck capitals do too. The table includes those exceptions, so they convert back like any other letter.

Combining marks. Underline and strikethrough do not replace letters. They add an invisible mark after each letter that draws a line. The converter removes those marks and keeps the letter underneath. The remaining text is normalised so that an accented letter that was styled comes back as a single clean character.

The formatter also has a detection step. It checks whether all the letters in a piece of text share one style and, if so, names it. That is how the full editor knows that text you paste in is already bold and shows it as bold rather than as a pile of odd characters. Detection is only a label. The conversion on this page does not depend on it, so mixed styles and partly styled sentences come back as plain letters.

Converting back is reliable for letters and digits in the supported alphabets. Some things are outside its reach, and a few are outside anyone’s.

• Emoji and symbols stay. An emoji or a check mark is not a styled letter, so there is nothing to convert. The text around it is cleaned and the symbol is kept.
• Characters from other generators. Some tools use alphabets this site does not generate, such as circled letters, upside-down text or full-width forms. Those characters sit outside the mathematical block, so they pass through unchanged.
• Zalgo and heavy decoration. Stacks of combining marks beyond underline and strikethrough are not removed.
• Lost original formatting. If styled text was pasted over a plain original, the original is gone. This page can only recover the letters, not the sentence you meant to write.

Check the preview after you press the button. If a few odd characters remain, they are almost certainly from one of the groups above, and you can delete or retype them directly in the editor.

Plain text is the best starting point for anything you intend to publish, because you choose the emphasis again with a clear head instead of inheriting someone else’s.

Paste the cleaned text back into the post formatter to rebuild the layout, add bold or italic only where it carries meaning, and use the preview to see where LinkedIn will cut it behind the see more link. The mobile preview shows that cut for phones and desktop. If you are rewriting a long post, a post template can give the new version a skeleton, so the draft you cleaned up is not the only structure you have to work with.

If the text you are cleaning started life as Markdown from an AI assistant, with asterisks and hash signs instead of styled letters, the Markdown to LinkedIn converter removes that notation and offers the same plain-text result.

A sensible habit: keep a plain-text copy of anything you style. Styled text is a finishing step, and the plain version is the master you can always come back to, edit and search.