Plain Text Export in Deckle

Export your manuscript as universally readable plain text: no formatting, no markup, just the words, openable by literally anything.

What You Can Do

• Export your entire manuscript as a single .txt file, straight from your project.
• Get a format guaranteed to open in absolutely anything: no markup, no proprietary formatting, no dependencies.
• Keep each chapter clearly separated, with its title and a divider between it and the next chapter.

How to Export a Plain Text File from Deckle

1. Open Compile from your project.
2. On the Format tab, select Plain Text.
3. Click Export Plain Text, choose where to save, and Deckle writes the file.

There's no target or variant to choose: Plain Text always exports the same way.

What Gets Kept and What Gets Lost

• Chapter titles and the divider between chapters are preserved. You can still tell exactly where one chapter ends and the next begins.
• All formatting is stripped. Bold, italic, headings: none of it carries over. That's the point of a plain-text export.
• Paragraph breaks are not preserved within a chapter. Every paragraph in a chapter is joined into one continuous block of text, separated only by single spaces, not line breaks.
• Scene breaks inside a chapter leave no visible marker. They collapse into that same single-space join, the same as an ordinary paragraph break.

A Couple of Things Worth Knowing

💡 If you need paragraph breaks and scene breaks preserved as actual visual separators, use Markdown export instead. It keeps every paragraph on its own line and renders scene breaks as a --- divider; Plain Text does neither.

💡 The Table of Contents option (Options tab) doesn't apply here. It's a layout option for PDF, EPUB, and DOCX exports only.

💡 Folders and Notes documents are skipped entirely. Only your actual chapters and scenes end up in the file.