What Markdown is
Markdown is a lightweight way of writing formatted text using plain characters. A pound sign at the start of a line makes a heading, asterisks around words make them bold or italic, and a hyphen starts a list item. John Gruber created it in 2004 so that documents would be readable as plain text and still convert to clean HTML. It is now used by README files, documentation sites, chat apps, note-taking apps and static site generators.
What this converter supports
- Headings with # up to ######, and horizontal rules with three hyphens.
- Emphasis: **bold**, *italic*, ***both*** and ~~strikethrough~~.
- Lists: bulleted with -, * or + and numbered with 1. style markers.
- Links and images: [text](url) and , with an optional title in quotes.
- Code: inline code in backticks and fenced blocks between triple backticks, with an optional language label.
- Block quotes with >, and tables using pipes with alignment colons in the divider row.
It is a compact converter rather than a complete CommonMark implementation. Nested lists, reference-style links, footnotes and raw HTML blocks are not supported, and consecutive lines in a paragraph become line breaks.
Safety by design
Everything you type is HTML-escaped first, so angle brackets in your text appear as text instead of becoming tags. A <script> tag in the Markdown ends up as harmless text in the output. Links with schemes such as javascript: are replaced with a harmless # link. In the preview, images are replaced by a text placeholder, so previewing never causes your browser to download a remote picture. The generated HTML code does include the image tags you wrote.
Using the output
The HTML box contains only the content markup, with no html or body wrapper, ready to paste into a CMS, an email template or a page. Add your own styles to taste. The conversion is done entirely in your browser, so private notes remain private.