JSON to TXT
Or paste subtitle text
What this conversion changes
5 things are dropped or need a decision
- Timing
the whole timeline (the output format records no timings at all)
- Styling
all styling (bold, italic, colour, outline, shadow)
- Positioning
on-screen positioning (every cue returns to the default position)
- Karaoke
karaoke timing (per-syllable highlighting)
- Line breaks
line breaks (multi-line cues will be joined into one line)
This list comes from the capability matrix for these two formats, not from the particular file you loaded. A specific file may lose more if it uses features the format allows but the matrix does not model.
This page converts JSON to TXT. Drop a file in — or paste the text — and you get the TXT version back. The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.
These two formats do not store the same things, and the difference is not cosmetic: timing, styling, positioning, karaoke and line breaks have nowhere to go in TXT. The list above comes from what the two formats can each express rather than from your file, so it is the same answer before you load anything.
One file is fine, and so is a whole season: the queue works through them in order and the results come down together as a single ZIP.
Examples
A typical JSON file, converted to TXT
Input
{
"version": 1,
"title": "Fixture: typical",
"fps": 25,
"styles": {
"Default": {
"name": "Default",
"fontFamily": "Arial",
"fontSize": 20,
"primaryColor": "#FFFFFF",
"bold": false,
"italic": false
}
},
"generator": "subtitlematrix fixtures",
"cues": [
{
"id": "1",
"start": 0,
"end": 2000,
"lines": [
"Hello world.",
"Second line."
],
"style": "Default",
"position": {
"x": 100,
"y": 200,
"align": "center"
}
},
{
"id": "2",
"start": 2500,
"end": 4000,
"lines": [
"Plain line.",
{
"text": "Styled line.",
"tags": [
{
"kind": "italic",
"start": 0,
"end": 6
}
]
}
]
},
{
"id": "3",
"start": 4500,
"end": 6000,
"lines": [
"Roger: I am here."
],
"speaker": "Roger"
}
]
}
Output
Hello world.
Second line.
Plain line.
Styled line.
Roger: I am here.
Dropped in this output: timing, styling, positioning, karaoke and line breaks. Everything else matches line for line.
The same conversion on an awkward input
Input
[
{ "start": 0, "end": 1000, "lines": ["First."] },
{ "start": 1000, "end": 2000, "text": "Second." },
"not an object",
{ "start": 2000, "end": 3000, "lines": ["Third."], "class": "top" }
]
Output
First.
Second.
Third.
This is the kind of damage real files have — mixed line endings, stray whitespace, fields left empty. Compare it with the tidy example above to see what the parser forgives.
Frequently asked questions
Where did the JSON timecodes go?
TXT has none to give: a text export is words, not moments. The order of the JSON lines is kept, so the fortieth line of your file is the fortieth line here, but nothing in the output says when any of it appears on screen.
What happens to bold, italic and colour from JSON to TXT?
TXT stores no styling of any kind, so all of it goes: the `tags` a cue's line carries, or an entry of the document's own `styles` object — none of it has anywhere to land, and every line is written as plain text. The words themselves are untouched.
What happens to the on-screen position from JSON to TXT?
TXT cannot say where a subtitle is drawn, so the position stored with each cue is dropped on the way out of JSON, and every cue goes back to the default position the player chooses — the bottom of the frame, centred, for most of them.
What happens to karaoke timing from JSON to TXT?
The timing goes; the words stay. Karaoke lives in the karaoke spans a JSON cue carries, which mark when each syllable lights up, and TXT has no way to record a moment inside a line — so the marks come off and the syllables arrive as ordinary TXT text.
What happens to a two-line JSON cue in TXT?
Both lines are written, one under the other, but the file stops saying they belong together: TXT cannot group lines into one cue, so reading the result back would give two subtitles where your JSON file had one. That matters if a translation pass or a retiming tool is going to read the file afterwards.
What does the output look like when JSON becomes TXT?
Like TXT: no cue numbers and no timecodes — one line of text per line of subtitle. Every JSON cue becomes one TXT cue, in the same order, with the same text.
Do JSON cues keep their order in the TXT output?
Yes, and they are sorted by start time on the way — earliest first, which is how every format here expects them and how players read them. If your JSON file listed its cues out of sequence, the TXT output puts them back in order; that is a change to the file's structure rather than its content, and it is deliberate.
Can I convert the TXT back to JSON?
Yes, and it has its own list: converting TXT to JSON drops timing. That list is different from the one above because the two formats keep different things.
Does the TXT output keep the JSON file's encoding?
No — the output is UTF-8, with Unix line endings and no byte-order mark, whatever the JSON file used. A file that arrives in UTF-16, or in a Windows single-byte encoding, is decoded on the way in (the result panel says so when that happens); what comes out is always the same UTF-8 TXT.