---
title: Plain Text exporter
description: The Plain Text exporter converts rendered Markdown documents to plain text by stripping all formatting while preserving readable content structure. This...
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/docs-builder/data/exporters/plain-text
products:
  - Elastic Docs Builder
---

# Plain Text exporter
The Plain Text exporter converts rendered Markdown documents to plain text by stripping all formatting while preserving readable content structure.

## Purpose

This exporter is primarily used internally by other components:
- **Search indexing** — the [Elasticsearch exporter](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/docs-builder/data/exporters/elasticsearch) uses plain text conversion to generate the searchable body of each document
- **Content extraction** — other exporters use plain text as an intermediate step


## Behavior

The exporter:
- Strips all Markdown formatting (bold, italic, links, etc.)
- Removes directive syntax and renders only the content within
- Preserves paragraph and heading structure as whitespace
- Resolves substitution variables to their values