Paste Markdown

What converts, and what it becomes

Headings become ATX headings, one to six hash signs followed by a space, which is the form the CommonMark spec (version 0.31.2, 2024) defines and the safest form across parsers. Bold becomes double asterisks, italic a single asterisk, strikethrough double tildes, and a link becomes bracketed text followed by its address in parentheses. An ordered list keeps its numbering, an unordered list uses hyphens, and a nested list is indented two spaces per level. A block quote gets a greater-than sign at the start of each line, a code block becomes a fenced block with triple backticks, and a horizontal rule becomes three hyphens.

Tables need a note of their own. The original Markdown from John Gruber in 2004 had no tables, and CommonMark does not define them either. The pipe table used here, header row, a row of hyphens, then data rows, is the GitHub Flavored Markdown extension, and it is the form GitHub, GitLab, Obsidian and most editors accept. If your target is a strict CommonMark parser, turn the tables option off and the tool writes each row as plain text instead. Images become an exclamation mark, bracketed alt text and the address in parentheses, and an image with no alt text gets empty brackets, which is a reminder to add a description before publishing.