Greetings from a pandoc newbie...

I'm trying to use pandoc to convert some RTF files to markdown. My goal is to extract the text with **bold** and *italics* preserved and no other formatting.

Simply converting with "pandoc in.rtf -o out.md" produces a markdown file that's not quite what I need. For instance, here's a line from the output:

FIRST and foremost, pandoc tries to preserve the underlined text, which I don't want. Can this be disabled? I've tried the "bracketed_spans" and "native_spans" extensions but this still processes the underlines as:

SECOND, at least when I view this in VSCode's markdown preview, the bold and emphasis are not presented correctly I guess because they touch each other or have spaces (or both?)? It displays correctly if it's:

**Scientific Name:** *Aplysia parvula* Morch, 1863

I realize that the text in the RTF might have the bold/italic tagged weirdly but is there a way to deal with this? I have about 500 such files to process, so I'm looking for automated methods.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!