Grab a Web Page in Plain Text with Markdownifier

We’ve written a lot about plain text at ProfHacker, from an introduction to Markdown, to using Pandoc, to creating slides from plain text. One thing I’d like to be able to do with plain text is this: Often I’d like to grab some text from a website in plain text. Copying and pasting into a text editor loses links and italics, while pasting into a word processor brings a lot of junk formatting with it. It’d be nice to be able to copy a website’s text in Markdown.

Brett Terpstra, the creator of nvALT (another ProfHacker favorite), has created a website  to do just that. His Markdownifier converts a website to plain text, preserving the essential formatting in Markdown.

The service has a few useful features. It can use Readability to strip out all the extraneous formatting. A button will copy the Markdown to your clipboard. And the site offers several bookmarklets so that you can easily use it on any website.

What do you do when you need to get text from a website?