Rich Text Editor

WYSIWYG text editor with bold, italic, lists, headings, links, and export to HTML or plain text.

Tested tool guide Text and writing tools Checked August 16, 2026

What Rich Text Editor does, with a checked example

Type or paste text, then style it with the toolbar: bold, italic, headings, bulleted or numbered lists, and links. Formatting renders in place, so the document you see is the document you export. The surprise for most users is the plain-text export: it keeps only the characters. Bold phrases and headings come back as unformatted text, list markers flatten, and link URLs vanish, because plain text cannot represent formatting. When the styling matters, choose HTML export instead and paste the markup into email, a CMS, or a web page.

Worked example

A concrete input and expected output from the current implementation.

Input

Q3 revenue rose 12% year over year.

Expected output

Q3 revenue rose 12% year over year.

With the words "rose 12%" set bold in the editor, the plain-text export keeps only the characters: bold, italic, and heading styles do not exist in that format, so the output is the visible sentence with every style stripped. The same sentence exported as HTML would carry the emphasis as tags instead.

How the result is produced

Selection versus paragraph styles

Bold, italic, and link act on whatever text you have selected: highlight a word, click the button, and only that word changes. Heading and list styles are paragraph-level: place the cursor anywhere in a paragraph and the whole paragraph restyles, keeping its existing bold and italic runs. This is the most common source of surprise: a heading button appears to restyle one line, but it restyles the entire paragraph.

Two export formats

HTML export produces markup for every style you applied: heading tags, list tags, emphasis tags for bold and italic, and anchor tags with URLs for links. Plain-text export discards all of it and returns only the characters, suitable for pasting into forms, terminals, or spreadsheets that reject HTML. Choose deliberately: the two formats are not interchangeable versions of the same output.

Good uses

Write an announcement with a heading, bold key figures, and a link, then export HTML to paste into a CMS that offers no editor of its own.
Restyle a messy block of notes as clean bullet lists and emphasis, then export plain text into a ticket or email system that strips HTML.
Draft a consistent HTML version of text written elsewhere so the styling matches a newsletter template, then export it to paste into a mail platform.

Limits and checks

Unformatted output usually means the wrong export was chosen: plain-text mode deliberately strips bold, italics, headings, list markers, and link URLs. Before assuming a bug, re-export with the HTML option and confirm the tags come back.
The exact tags in the HTML export are the tool's choice: bold may come out as <strong> or <b>, and heading levels may not match your document's outline. Most destinations accept either, but verify the result after pasting before relying on tag-level compatibility.
Spacing in the editor is approximate: a visible blank line can be one paragraph break or several, and paragraphs that look identical can export different markup. If spacing matters downstream, count paragraph breaks in the exported HTML rather than trusting the on-screen gap.

Common questions

Can I paste HTML into the editor and keep its formatting?

Not reliably. Pasted content is interpreted by the editor: formatting can survive, be stripped, or be changed, and the on-screen result alone does not tell you what the underlying markup looks like. After pasting, export to HTML and compare the tags with what you pasted. If they differ, restyle the text with the toolbar instead.

Why did my formatted text export as plain characters?

You chose the plain-text export. Plain text cannot carry formatting, so bold, italic, heading styles, list markers, and link URLs are all discarded and only the characters remain. That is expected behavior, not a bug. Re-export with the HTML option to keep the styling.

References and verification

The example and behavioral notes were checked against the browser implementation. Standards and primary references below define the relevant format, formula, or platform behavior.