Markdown to HTML Converter

Paste Markdown on the left, get HTML on the right, and see the rendered result beside it as you type. This converter handles headings, bold, italic, links, images, ordered and unordered lists, blockquotes, inline code, fenced code blocks, horizontal rules and tables. When it looks right, copy the HTML to the clipboard or download it as a file.

It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, no document is stored, and there is no account. That matters when the Markdown you are converting is an unpublished draft, internal documentation or a client deliverable, which covers most of the reasons anyone opens a converter. If the text needs tidying first, the text cleaner strips smart quotes and stray formatting.

How to use

1. Paste or type your Markdown into the input pane on the left.
2. Watch the HTML build in the code pane and the rendered version in the preview beside it.
3. Fix anything that renders differently from what you expected, most often list indentation or a missing blank line before a table.
4. Check that fenced code blocks came through as pre and code elements rather than as paragraphs.
5. Copy the HTML to your clipboard with the copy button.
6. Or download it as a file if you want it saved rather than pasted.
7. Drop the result into your CMS, email builder or template and confirm it still looks right there.

Why use our markdown to html converter?

I built this after pasting a long README into a CMS that ate every table in it. The tables collapsed into unstyled runs of pipe characters, and I spent an hour hand-writing markup a converter would have produced in a second. Tables are the most common thing basic converters skip and the most common thing I need, so they were the first feature rather than the last.

The preview sitting next to the code is the part I use most. HTML alone tells you what was generated and a preview alone tells you what it looks like, but the two together tell you why something is wrong. When a list flattens into a paragraph, you can see in the code that the nesting produced a sibling rather than a child, and the fix is two spaces of indentation rather than a rewrite.

Raw HTML inside your Markdown is escaped rather than executed, and that is deliberate. The first version passed raw HTML straight through, which is what most parsers do by default, and within a day I had pasted a snippet from a web page whose script tag happily ran inside my own preview pane. Nothing bad happened. It easily could have. Escaping means a pasted div shows up as visible text, which is occasionally annoying and always safe.

Markdown has no single standard, and anyone who says otherwise has only used one platform. Nested lists, underscores inside words, line breaks and table alignment all differ between implementations. This follows the common CommonMark style behavior, and the CommonMark specification explains why an edge case resolved the way it did. The preview is the practical answer: it shows exactly what the generated HTML produces, so you are never guessing.

What I refuse to add is a WYSIWYG layer. The moment a converter lets you style the output, it starts injecting inline CSS and wrapper divs, and the clean semantic HTML that made Markdown worth using is gone. What comes out here has no classes, no inline styles and no junk. I usually run the same draft through the word counter at that point, because a piece that felt long often is not.

Who is this tool for?

Developers use it for documentation that has to live in two places. A README renders itself on a code host, but the same content on a marketing site or an internal wiki often needs real HTML. Converting once and pasting beats maintaining two copies that quietly drift apart. If the rest of your day involves reshaping structured data, the JSON formatter and the XML to JSON converter sit in the same corner of the site.

Writers and editors use the preview as a proofing surface rather than a conversion step. Rendered text reads differently from source text, and mistakes that hide in raw Markdown jump out once the headings are actually headings and the emphasis is actually emphasis.

It also comes up when you inherit someone else's Markdown and need to know whether it is any good. Paste it in and the structure is immediately visible: whether headings step down properly, whether lists nest, whether that bold line was really meant to be a heading. Structural problems invisible in a source file are obvious in an outline.

Frequently asked questions