How to Remove Fancy Text and Restore Normal Letters
How to convert styled Unicode back to plain letters, and why the conversion cannot always be perfectly reversed.
Why you might need to
Styled text breaks search, sorting and accessibility. If you are pasting a name into a form, importing a list into a spreadsheet, or making an old bio readable again, you need the plain letters back.
How the conversion works
Most styled characters have a documented compatibility decomposition: Unicode records that U+1D400 is a bold presentation of the ordinary letter A. Applying that mapping recovers the plain text reliably for the mathematical alphabets, fullwidth forms, circled and squared letters, superscripts and subscripts.
Combining marks such as strikethrough and underline are separate characters attached to a base letter, so removing them is simply a matter of stripping the marks.
Where it is lossy
Blanket normalisation is not safe, which is why this tool does not simply apply NFKC to everything you paste.
- Full compatibility normalisation also rewrites characters you may want to keep, such as ligatures, some spacing, and certain CJK forms.
- Upside-down text uses unrelated characters chosen for their shape; there is no formal mapping back, so reversal is best-effort.
- Characters with no decomposition — most decorative symbols — have no plain equivalent and are removed or kept as-is, your choice.
Check before you commit
The tool shows a before-and-after preview and reports exactly how many characters it changed. Read it before copying, particularly for text in a script other than Latin.