Sorry if anyone gets this twice, had to correct my formatting...

I'm trying to use pandoc (for the first time) 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:

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

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!