Remove Bold 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 takes the bold off every subtitle line and changes nothing else. The words come back as they were typed, with their timecodes, their order and their line breaks intact, and any italics, underlines or colours on the same line are left exactly where the file put them. Bold is removed because it was asked for, not because bold is wrong.
Bold is the styling that gets reached for when a line is doing a job other than dialogue. A chapter heading, a song title, a piece of on-screen text, a phone number, a sign in the shot, a caption the programme itself is displaying — all of those get bolded by whoever prepared the file, and by the time it is delivered the emphasis is often in the way. Reviewers ask for it gone because their house style reserves bold for something else, or because the styling came from a template nobody chose.
The removal is format-agnostic in the sense that matters: SRT, WebVTT, SBV and SAMI spell bold as `<b>` and `</b>`, ASS and SSA spell it as `{\b1}` and `{\b0}`, and TTML writes a span with a bold font weight. A file is read for the format it actually is rather than for the extension it carries. One detail worth knowing if you work with fansubs: a weighted bold such as `{\b700}` asks for a heavier weight than plain bold, and it is read as bold all the same, so it goes the same way as `{\b1}`.
Nothing is uploaded — the file is read and written inside the browser tab. A file with no bold in it comes back byte for byte, which is the honest result of a run that found nothing to do.
Examples
A heading cue and an emphasised word
Input
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
<b>CHAPTER ONE</b>
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000
The <b>room</b> was dark.
Output
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
CHAPTER ONE
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000
The room was dark.
A cue bolded as a whole and one word emphasised in the middle lose their bold the same way. The capitals in the first cue stay, because this page never touches case — if that is what you are after, the pages that upper-case and lower-case subtitle text are the ones for it.
Bold and italic on the same line
Input
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
<i>A voice off screen.</i> <b>She left.</b>
Output
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
<i>A voice off screen.</i> She left.
The italic survives and the bold goes, on the same line. This is the run that keeps a file's conventions intact: italics for off-screen speech, bold for emphasis, and only the second of the two taken away. Removing both at once is a different page, and it is the one to reach for once you have decided the file needs no styling at all.
A weighted bold in an ASS file
Input
[Script Info]
Title: bold
[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,20,&H00FFFFFF,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,1,1,2,10,10,10,1
[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:00:01.00,0:00:02.00,Default,,0,0,0,,{\b1}hello{\b0} {\b700}there{\b0}
Output
[Script Info]
Title: bold
[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,20,&H00FFFFFF,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,1,1,2,10,10,10,1
[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:00:01.00,0:00:02.00,Default,,0,0,0,,hello there
Both runs go, including the weighted one. `{\b700}` is not an override code the tool failed to understand — it is bold with a weight, and it is stripped like any other bold, so a fansub file that asks for heavier type is handled by the same run. The words between the two runs keep their own spacing.
Frequently asked questions
How is bold written in each subtitle format?
SRT, WebVTT, SBV and SAMI use a pair of `<b>` tags around the words. ASS and SSA use `{\b1}` to turn bold on and `{\b0}` to turn it off, with an optional weight such as `{\b700}` for heavier type. TTML wraps the text in a span carrying a bold font weight. The page reads all of those as the same thing, so the result does not depend on which format your file happens to be in.
Does stripping bold affect the timing or the line breaks?
No. Only the markup around the words is rewritten, so every cue keeps its start and end to the millisecond and cues stay in the order the file had them. Line breaks inside a cue are part of the cue's structure rather than of its styling, so a two-line cue still has two lines afterwards — the break is wherever the file had put it.
Why would anyone want bold subtitles removed?
Usually because the bold arrived with the file rather than being chosen for it. Bold gets used for chapter headings, song titles, on-screen text and signage, and it is often inherited from a template or copied in from a transcript, so a delivery spec that reserves bold for something else will reject it. Removing it also matters for readability: emphasis competes with the reading-speed budget a subtitle line already has.
Can I keep bold on the cues that are headings and remove it elsewhere?
Not on this page, which works on the whole file. The practical route is to run the page and then put the bold back on the handful of cues that need it, or to split the file first and run the page on one part of it. A per-cue decision cannot be read out of a single dropped file, so there is nothing for the page to go on.
What happens to the other styling on a line when the bold goes?
It stays. Italic, underline, colour and karaoke timing ranges are separate from the bold range, so a line that is both bold and italic comes back italic and not bold. That is deliberate and it is the reason this page exists next to Strip All Formatting from Subtitles: the common job is taking one kind of emphasis out of a file while the rest of the file's conventions stay as they were.
Why is my ASS file's bold still there after this run?
Check whether it is really bold. ASS can make text look heavy through the named style in its stylesheet rather than through an inline tag, and this page only removes the inline ranges — it does not touch the stylesheet or the style a cue points at. A cue whose style is itself bold keeps looking bold, because the boldness is a property of the style rather than of the text.