Markdown to HTML

Type or paste Markdown in the left box and the formatted result appears on the right while you type. Switch the right side between Preview, which shows the finished page, and HTML code, which shows the exact markup you will copy. There is no Convert button to press and nothing to wait for.

The converter follows GitHub-flavoured Markdown, so tables with column alignment, task lists, strikethrough, bare web addresses and fenced code blocks all work the way they do in a README. Under the boxes you choose the output: a plain HTML fragment to paste into a website or CMS, a complete HTML page with a title and a light or dark style, or a minified version on one line.

Everything runs in your browser. Your text is never uploaded, and the preview is shown in a sandbox where scripts cannot run, so even a strange file you open cannot do anything on this page.

Markdown is a way of writing formatted text with ordinary characters. A line starting with # is a heading, words between two stars are bold, and a line starting with a dash is a list item. It reads naturally even before it is converted, which is why it is used for README files, notes, documentation, forums and chat apps.

HTML is what browsers actually display. Writing it by hand means opening and closing a tag for every paragraph, list item and link, which is slow and easy to get wrong. Writing in Markdown and converting gives you the speed of plain text and the reach of HTML: the result works in any browser, website builder or CMS.

Markdown files are also small, easy to compare between versions and readable in any text editor for decades to come. Keeping the Markdown as your source and creating HTML whenever you need it is a simple, safe way to manage writing that changes over time.

A good markdown to html converter should give you markup you can trust and read. This one is built on marked, a widely used open-source Markdown parser released under the MIT licence. It turns headings into h1 to h6, paragraphs into p, lists into ul and ol, emphasis into strong and em, quotes into blockquote, and code into code and pre. No extra wrapper divs, class names or tracking attributes are added.

Because the conversion happens on every keystroke, you can write and check at the same time. Type a heading, see it appear. Add a table row, see the table grow. If something looks wrong in the preview, the HTML code view shows you exactly which tag was produced, which makes it easy to find a missing blank line or an extra space.

Two small counts sit above the boxes: the number of words in your Markdown and the number of headings. They are handy when you write to a length, and the heading count tells you quickly whether a table of contents will have anything in it. For a deeper look at length, the Word Counter and the Character Counter give more detail.

Many people only need a quick result: a block of notes that has to become HTML for a blog post, a help article or a product page. Doing markdown to html online here takes a few seconds. Paste, glance at the preview, press Copy HTML, and paste into your editor's HTML or source view.

Nothing is sent to a server. The page loads once and then does all of the work on your own computer or phone, which means private notes, drafts and internal documents stay with you. It also means there is no file size limit set by an upload form and no waiting in a queue.

The page works in current versions of the common desktop and mobile browsers. On a narrow screen the Markdown box and the preview stack on top of each other instead of sitting side by side, and all of the buttons stay the same.

There is no account, no trial and no daily limit. You can convert one line or a long manual, as often as you like. Every feature on the page, including the full page output, the dark style, the download and the print to PDF, is available to everyone.

The tool can stay markdown to html free because the work is done by your own browser, so there is no server time to pay for. Nothing in the converter is locked behind a payment.

You may use the HTML you make for anything, including commercial websites and client work. The output is your own content turned into markup; no notice or link back is added to it.

Sometimes you do not want to convert anything. You just received a README.md, a CHANGELOG or a set of notes and want to read it as a proper document instead of a wall of hashes and asterisks. As a markdown viewer online, this page does that: press Open .md file, pick the file, and the Preview side shows it with real headings, lists, tables and code blocks.

The file name becomes the page title, so if you later download the .html or print to PDF, the file gets a sensible name. You can edit the text in the left box before you save, for example to fix a typo or remove a private section.

Images in a Markdown file are written as links to picture files. A picture with a full web address (starting with https://) loads in the preview if that site allows it. A picture with a relative path, such as images/logo.png, points to a file next to the original .md file on your disk or in a repository, so it cannot be shown here. The img tag is still kept correctly in the HTML.

The preview is a real web page drawn inside a frame, styled with the same readable stylesheet that the Full HTML page output uses. Switch Page style to Dark and the preview turns dark as well, so you see what your downloaded page will look like.

That frame is sandboxed, and scripts are not allowed to run in it. If your Markdown contains raw HTML with a script tag, an onclick attribute or a javascript: link, it is kept in the HTML code but does nothing in the preview. This is what makes it safe to use a markdown preview online on files from other people.

The preview always shows a full page, even when Output is set to HTML fragment. The fragment itself has no styles; it takes on the look of whatever site you paste it into. So if your site uses different fonts or colours, the final result will look like your site, not like this preview.

Markdown started as a simple set of conventions, and many variants have grown from it. The most common today is GitHub-flavoured Markdown, often shortened to GFM. It keeps the original rules and adds tables, task lists, strikethrough and automatic links. The option GitHub style (tables, task lists, ~~strike~~) is ticked by default and switches these extras on.

Untick it if you want only the original, stricter rules, for example to match an older system that does not know about tables. With it off, a table stays as lines of text with pipes, ~~text~~ stays as text with tildes, and a bare web address is not turned into a link.

Some features found in other Markdown tools are not part of this converter: footnotes, maths formulas, diagrams written in code blocks, emoji shortcodes such as :smile: and attribute blocks in curly braces. Text using them stays as written. You can still use raw HTML for anything Markdown cannot express, as explained further down.

Start a bulleted list with a dash, a star or a plus sign, followed by a space. Start a numbered list with a number and a full stop, such as 1. The HTML uses the number you write first as the starting number, so a list that begins with 3. is output with start="3", and the numbers after it are counted automatically.

To nest a list inside another, indent the inner items so they line up under the text of the item above, usually two to four spaces. A paragraph or a code block can belong to a list item in the same way: leave a blank line and indent it to match.

Task lists are bulleted items that begin with [ ] for an open task or [x] for a finished one. They become list items with a checkbox in front. The checkboxes are disabled in the HTML, because a static page has nowhere to save a tick, so they show status rather than act as a form.

A link is written as the visible text in square brackets followed by the address in round brackets. You can add a title in quotes after the address, which most browsers show as a tooltip. With GitHub style ticked, a bare address such as https://example.com or www.example.com is turned into a link without any brackets.

Links to other headings on the same page use a # and the heading id, for example [see the setup](#setup). Keep Ids on headings ticked so those targets exist. If you want readers to stay on your page when they follow links to other sites, tick Open web links in a new tab.

Images use the same pattern as links with an exclamation mark in front: . Always fill in the alt text. It is read aloud by screen readers, shown when an image fails to load, and helps search engines understand the picture. The converter does not resize or upload images; it only writes the img tag that points to them.

Tables are the feature people ask about most. A table is written as a header row, a row of dashes, and then the body rows, with pipes between the cells. The markdown to html table output is a proper table element with thead and tbody, th cells for the header and td cells for the body, so it works with any table styling your site already has.

Colons in the dash row set the alignment of each column. :--- aligns left, ---: aligns right, and :---: centres the column. The converter adds an alignment attribute to every cell of that column, which browsers and most editors honour. Right alignment is the usual choice for prices and other numbers, so the digits line up.

A few limits come from Markdown itself rather than from this tool. Each row must stay on one line. A cell holds inline content only: bold, italic, code, links and images, but not lists or several paragraphs. To show a pipe character inside a cell, write it as \|. If you need a line break inside a cell, a raw <br> tag works, because raw HTML is kept.

The outer pipes at the start and end of each row are optional, and the columns do not have to line up in your source. Lining them up only makes the Markdown easier to read; the HTML is the same either way.

HTML fragment is the default. It contains only the converted content, from the first heading to the last paragraph, with no html, head or body tags. This is what you want for a blog editor, a CMS field, a help desk article or a template, where the page around it already exists.

Full HTML page wraps the content in a complete document: a doctype, a head with the character set, a mobile viewport tag, your page title and a small stylesheet, then the body. When you pick it, a box for the page title appears next to the options, along with Page style: Light or Dark. The style keeps lines at a comfortable reading width and gives tables, code and quotes clear borders and backgrounds. Save it and it opens in any browser as a neat document.

Minified removes the white space between tags and joins all lines into one. It is useful when HTML has to fit into a single line, such as a JSON value, a database field or a config file. Be careful with code blocks: because line breaks are joined, multi-line code loses its line structure in the minified output. Use the fragment when your text contains code.

Copy HTML always copies the output you have selected, and the HTML code view on the right always shows that same output, so what you see is what you paste.

The .html button saves a complete page to your device. If Output is set to Full HTML page, it saves exactly that page. If Output is HTML fragment or Minified, the download still wraps your content in a full page with the title and style you chose, because a bare fragment would open as unstyled text. This makes a markdown to html file that anyone can open by double-clicking.

The file is named after the page title. It starts as Document, and opening a .md file sets it to that file's name, so notes.md downloads as notes.html. Characters that are not allowed in file names are replaced with an underscore.

A downloaded page needs nothing else to work: the styles are inside the file, and there are no scripts, fonts or images to fetch, apart from any images your Markdown links to. You can attach it to a message, put it on a USB stick or upload it to any web host.

Should you share a document as a web page or as a PDF? Choosing between markdown to html or pdf depends on where it is going. HTML is best for anything that lives on a website, will be edited again or should reflow on a phone. PDF is best for a fixed document to attach, print or archive, where the layout must look the same everywhere.

The PDF button here does not make a PDF file by itself. It opens your content as a print-ready page in a new window and opens your browser's print dialog. Choose Save as PDF as the printer, and your browser writes the PDF. This keeps the text real and selectable, and the links stay clickable in most browsers.

Before that page opens, anything that could run is taken out: script tags, iframes, embedded objects, onclick style attributes and javascript: links. If nothing happens when you press PDF, your browser has probably blocked the new window; allow pop-ups for this site and try again.

With the Dark page style, many browsers leave out background colours when printing unless you tick Background graphics in the print dialog, so a dark page may print as light text on white. For printing, the Light style is usually the better choice. When you have several PDFs to join, Merge PDF puts them together, and Compress PDF makes a large file smaller.

Writing a newsletter or an announcement in Markdown is pleasant, and then the question is how to get it into an email. Converting markdown to html for email works for the structure: headings, paragraphs, bold, lists and links all come out as simple tags that email programs understand.

Here is the honest part. This tool does not add inline styles. The Full HTML page output puts its styling in a style block in the head, and many email programs remove or ignore style blocks, keeping only styles written directly on each tag. So in an email, expect your content to show with the email program's default fonts and spacing, not with the look of the preview.

For most emails the best route is to copy the HTML fragment and paste it into the HTML or source view of your email platform, then let the platform's own template supply fonts and colours. Avoid relying on wide tables, which can be hard to read on a phone, and keep images as full https:// addresses, because relative paths will not load in anyone's inbox.

Always send yourself a test first. Some email programs also strip ids, which means a table of contents will not jump to its sections, so leave the Table of contents option off for email.

Files ending in .md are plain text, and you can open them in any text editor. Turning md to html simply means running that text through a Markdown parser. Press Open .md file and pick a file; the converter accepts .md, .markdown, .mdown and .txt. The text replaces whatever is in the box, and the file stays on your device.

README files from code projects are the most common case. They usually contain headings, install commands in fenced code blocks, badges written as images, and tables of options. All of these convert, although badges and screenshots with relative paths will not show in the preview, for the reason explained above.

If a file shows odd symbols such as é instead of é, it was saved in an older text encoding rather than UTF-8. Open it in a text editor, save it again as UTF-8 and open it here once more.

Fenced code blocks start and end with three backticks on their own line. Put a language name right after the opening backticks, such as ```js or ```python, and the converter keeps it as a class on the code tag: class="language-js". Inside a code block, characters such as < and & are escaped, so the code shows as written instead of being read as HTML.

The code itself is not coloured. Syntax highlighting is not part of this converter. The language class is exactly what common highlighting libraries such as highlight.js and Prism look for, so if your website already loads one of them, your code blocks will be coloured there automatically.

Inline code uses single backticks: `npm install`. To show a backtick inside inline code, wrap it in double backticks with spaces. Indenting lines by four spaces also makes a code block, the older way, but it has no place for a language name.

Markdown allows raw HTML, and this converter keeps it. A details block, a coloured span, a video tag or a br inside a table cell all pass straight through to the output. This is useful, because it covers everything Markdown has no syntax for.

It also means the output is not sanitized. If the Markdown contains a script tag or an onclick attribute, the HTML you copy or download contains it too. The preview never runs it, and the print page removes it, but your website will run it if you publish it. Only publish Markdown you wrote yourself or trust.

If you accept Markdown from visitors, for example in comments or a support form, do not paste the output straight into your pages. Run it through an HTML sanitizer on your server first, one that allows only safe tags and attributes. Converting and cleaning are separate jobs, and this tool only does the first one.

The conversion runs in your browser with JavaScript that loads with the page. Your Markdown is not sent to FlipMyFormat or anyone else, there is no account, and nothing is stored on a server. Only your option choices are saved, in your own browser, so the page opens the way you left it.

The preview runs in a sandbox without scripts, and the print page has scripts and similar content removed first. The HTML you copy or download, however, is exactly what the converter produced, raw HTML included, so review it before you publish anything that came from someone else.

Once you have your HTML, a few other tools can help. The Word Counter gives reading time and more detail on your text, and the Character Counter is useful for meta descriptions and other length limits. To check what changed between two versions of a page, paste both into the Diff Checker.

If you need a PDF from a Word document rather than from Markdown, Word to PDF converts .docx files, and Merge PDF joins several PDFs into one. For data that ends up in your pages, the JSON Formatter tidies and checks JSON.