Plain Text Output
Get visible text from the document with getPlainText(). The editor still stores HTML.
How it works
The editor stores HTML, but getPlainText()returns just the visible text — formatting dropped, block structure surviving as line breaks. That is what you want for search indexing, previews, notification snippets, and any count a user would recognise.
getPlainText()
0 words · 0 characters — counted on the text, not the markup (0 characters of HTML).
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Example code
// Visible text, with block structure surviving as line breaks.
const text = editor.getPlainText(); // editor.getText() is an alias
// Character and word counts should measure TEXT, not markup:
const characters = text.length;
const words = text.trim() ? text.trim().split(/\s+/).length : 0;
// And the reverse — replace the document with plain text:
editor.setPlainText("Line one\nLine two");Counting getHTMLCode().length instead is the common mistake: a short sentence wrapped in a few tags reads as hundreds of characters, and the number a user sees stops matching the one you enforce.
Why not just read the text content? Because textContent concatenates without regard for structure: three list items come back as AlphaBravoCharlie, and a search index then tokenises the last word of one item and the first of the next as a single term. getPlainText() is layout-aware, so the same list comes back as Alpha\nBravo\nCharlie— blocks separated by a blank line, list items by a single one.