Introduction

Stencila can export documents to plain text, producing a flat text representation that strips all structural markup, styling, and metadata. This format is useful when you need raw text content for copy/paste, text analysis, or integration with tools that expect unformatted input.

Usage

Use the .txt file extension, or the --to text option, when converting to plain text e.g.

stencila convert doc.smd doc.txt

Info

Plain text is encode-only. Stencila cannot reconstruct a structured document from a plain text file.

Implementation

Plain text encoding is implemented in the Rust crate codec-text, using the text trait helpers in codec-text-trait.

Limitations

Plain text is encode-only. Import (decoding) from plain text is not supported.

All document structure is lost: headings become plain lines, links lose their URLs, tables lose their structure, and code blocks lose their language annotations.

Images and other media are omitted entirely from the output.