What gets stripped
| Markdown | Becomes |
|---|---|
## Heading | Heading |
**bold**, *italic*, ~~strike~~ | bold, italic, strike |
[docs](https://…) | docs (or “docs (https://…)” with Keep URLs) |
 | logo (the alt text) |
`code` and fences | the code, without backticks |
> quote | quote |
| Tables | tab-separated rows |
| HTML tags and comments | removed |
Plain text or rich text?
If you’re pasting into Gmail, Google Docs, Word or Slack and want bold and links to survive, you don’t want plain text; use Markdown to rich text instead. Plain text is for places that can’t show formatting at all: SMS, app store descriptions, form fields, commit subjects and text-to-speech scripts.
Why not just delete the symbols?
A blind find-and-replace of * and # breaks real content: prices like “5 * 3”, hashtags, file names with underscores. This converter follows Markdown’s rules, removing a marker only where it actually formats something, and keeps escaped characters like \* as the literal symbol.