SMI 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)
- Line breaks
line breaks (multi-line cues will be joined into one line)
- Format-specific content
content the source format keeps outside its cues (non-cue blocks, header text, per-cue settings, commented-out events) — the target format has no place for it
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 SMI 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, line breaks and format-specific content 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 SMI file, converted to TXT
Input
<SAMI>
<HEAD>
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
<!--
P { text-align: center; font-family: Arial; }
.ENCC { Name: English; lang: en-US; }
-->
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<SYNC Start=1000>
<P Class=ENCC>Hello there.
<SYNC Start=3000>
<P Class=ENCC>
<SYNC Start=3500>
<P Class=ENCC>How are you?<br>Fine, thanks.
<SYNC Start=6000>
<P Class=ENCC>
</BODY>
</SAMI>
Output
Hello there.
How are you?
Fine, thanks.
Dropped in this output: timing, styling, positioning, line breaks and format-specific content. Everything else matches line for line.
The same conversion on an awkward input
Input
<SAMI>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Episode 1</TITLE>
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
<!--
.ENCC { Name: English; }
-->
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<sync start="00:00:02,500">
<P Class=ENCC>Line one<br>Line two
<sync start=9000>
<P Class=ENCC>Tom & Jerry
<SYNC Start=12000>
<P Class=ENCC>
</BODY>
</SAMI>
Output
Line one
Line two
Tom & Jerry
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 SMI timecodes go?
TXT has none to give: a text export is words, not moments. The order of the SMI 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 SMI to TXT?
TXT stores no styling of any kind, so all of it goes: an `<i>` or `<font color="…">` written into the paragraph text, or a rule in the head's `<STYLE>` block — 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 SMI to TXT?
TXT cannot say where a subtitle is drawn, so the paragraph attributes and the CSS they point at are dropped on the way out of SMI, 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 a two-line SMI 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 SMI file had one. That matters if a translation pass or a retiming tool is going to read the file afterwards.
What happens to SAMI's `<STYLE>` block, `<TITLE>` and `Class=` attributes in TXT?
They are dropped. SAMI says what its subtitles look like outside the text of the cue: a `<STYLE>` block of CSS for the paragraphs, a `<TITLE>`, and the channel marker each paragraph carries — `Class=ENCC`, which points at one of those rules. TXT stores cues rather than a document, so there is nowhere for any of that to go. Emphasis written inside a cue's own text is unaffected — that belongs to the line — and the cues come through with their text and timings whole.
What does the output look like when SMI becomes TXT?
Like TXT: no cue numbers and no timecodes — one line of text per line of subtitle. Every SMI cue becomes one TXT cue, in the same order, with the same text.
Do SMI 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 SMI 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 SMI?
Yes, and it has its own list: converting TXT to SMI drops timing. That list is different from the one above because the two formats keep different things.
Does the TXT output keep the SMI file's encoding?
No — the output is UTF-8, with Unix line endings and no byte-order mark, whatever the SMI 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.