Remove Italic Tags from Subtitles
Or paste subtitle text
Options
One box, seven choices, and each choice has a page of its own. Italic, bold, underline and colour remove that one kind of range and leave the rest of the line's styling alone. All removes every range the tool models — those four plus karaoke timing — while leaving everything else in the text untouched. HTML does the same and then also sweeps out the angle-bracket markup that was left in the text because the tool does not model it, such as VTT's <v Bob> speaker tags and <c.className>. ASS does the same for override blocks instead, clearing the {...} codes that were not recognised at parse time, such as {\fad(500,500)}. This page fills the box in with the choice its title names and lists no other.
Which frame rate the timings are counted in. On the format pages this is what MicroDVD needs, because it stores timing as frame numbers. On the frame rate pages it is the rate the file was timed against — the version the subtitles were made for — and the page's second box takes the rate of the video you are going to use them with. 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50, 59.94 and 60 are the common ones. Getting it wrong shifts the whole timeline, and on the frame rate pages it shifts it by a ratio rather than by a fixed amount.
This page removes every italic range from a subtitle file and leaves the words alone. Drop the file in, run it, and the cue text comes back exactly as it was written — same spelling, same punctuation, same line breaks, same timecodes — with the italic markup gone. It is not a conversion and not a rewrite: the only thing that changes is which stretches of text the file says should be slanted.
Italic is the one piece of inline styling almost every subtitle file uses, because it carries meaning rather than decoration. Off-screen dialogue, a voice on a phone, a narrator, a foreign word, a title card and an inner thought are all conventionally italicised. That is why this is a separate page from removing bold or underlines: on a normal file you want to take one of those away and keep the rest, and a page that removes everything cannot do that.
The same removal works whichever way the file spells it. SRT, WebVTT, SBV and SAMI write `<i>` and `</i>`; ASS and SSA write `{\i1}` and `{\i0}`; TTML writes a span with a font style. Those are different syntaxes for the same fact, and the file is read for what it is rather than for what its extension claims, so the run behaves the same on all of them. One thing the page deliberately leaves in place is a WebVTT class tag like `<c.lawyer>`: that is a name the page's own stylesheet defines, not an italic range, and the tool never modelled it — the page that sweeps those away says so in its title.
Nothing is uploaded. The file is read and written inside the browser tab, so material that cannot leave the machine stays on it, and a file that had no italics to begin with comes back byte for byte.
Examples
Off-screen dialogue in an SRT file
Input
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
<i>A voice off screen.</i> The door opens.
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000
<i>I can hear you.</i>
Output
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
A voice off screen. The door opens.
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000
I can hear you.
Both italic ranges go, including the one that covers a whole cue, and the second cue's text is untouched. Where an italic range sat next to ordinary dialogue in the same line, the words on either side close up with a single space, which is what the line looked like to a reader all along.
A WebVTT file that also carries a class tag
Input
WEBVTT
00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:02.000
<c.lawyer><i>The defendant was not present.</i></c>
Output
WEBVTT
00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:02.000
<c.lawyer>The defendant was not present.</c>
The italic goes and `<c.lawyer>` stays. A class name is not a style range — it is looked up in the page's stylesheet, and `<c.lawyer>` is free to mean anything there. Leaving it is the honest reading of a tag the tool never modelled; the page that removes markup of that shape is Remove HTML Tags from Subtitles.
A file with no italics in it
Input
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
<b>The room was dark.</b>
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000
She left early.
Output
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
<b>The room was dark.</b>
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000
She left early.
There was nothing to remove, so the file comes back byte for byte and the bold is left where it was. On a file where you suspect italics rather than see them, this is the cheapest way to find out — and it will not quietly take the bold with it.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as an italic range in a subtitle file?
However the file spells it. In an SRT or WebVTT file it is a pair of `<i>` tags around some words; in an ASS or SSA file it is `{\i1}` and `{\i0}`; in TTML it is a span with a font style of italic. All three describe the same thing, and the page reads each file for the format it actually is, so it finds the range whichever syntax carries it. It does not guess: text that merely looks slanted, like a line typed in a decorative font, has no italic range and is not touched.
Does removing italics change the timecodes or the text?
Neither. The page only rewrites the markup around the words, so every cue keeps its start and end to the millisecond, the cue order is the file's own, and the number of cues is unchanged. The text is byte-identical apart from the tag characters themselves — no punctuation is added, no line is joined to another, and a cue with two lines still has two lines after the run.
Can I remove italics from some cues and keep them on others?
Not on this page: the whole file is done, every cue, every line. If part of the file needs to keep its italics, the route that works today is to run the page and then either put the tags back on the cues you wanted to keep, or split the file first and run the page on one part. A per-cue choice is not something a dropped file can express — there is nothing in the file for the page to read it from.
Why do the italics matter enough to have a page of their own?
Because in subtitles they usually carry meaning rather than decoration. A line in italics is conventionally a voice that is not on screen, a narrator, a foreign-language word or an inner thought, and a reader who loses that loses part of what the scene said. That is also why the page exists separately from stripping all formatting: on a real file you often want the italics taken out for a house style while the bold headline cue stays bold.
Why is a WebVTT class tag still in my file after this run?
Because a class name is not an italic range. `<c.lawyer>` does not say the text is styled a particular way — it says the text belongs to a named group, and what that group looks like is decided by a stylesheet the file does not contain. The tool never modelled those tags, so it leaves them in the text rather than deleting something it cannot read. Remove HTML Tags from Subtitles is the page that sweeps them out, and it says so in its title.
Is the italic removal applied to the words inside a cue or to the whole cue?
To whatever stretch of text the file marked, which is often not the whole cue. A line can open with an italic aside and then return to ordinary type, and only the aside loses its markup; the italic range that spans an entire cue, which is the usual case for off-screen dialogue, takes the whole line. Either way the characters themselves are never rewritten, so nothing depends on where the range started.