Markdown is plain text with lightweight punctuation for headings, links, and lists, readable before it is ever rendered.
Common Uses
File storage and sharing
Data exchange between applications
Content distribution
Markdown Conversion FAQ
What is a Markdown file?
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Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax. It is widely used for README files, documentation, and technical writing. Files typically have .md or .markdown extensions.
What is lost when a formatted document becomes Markdown?
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Everything except the words. Markdown holds characters and line breaks, so fonts, sizes, colours, tables, images and footnotes all disappear on the way in. That is exactly why it is used: it is the format nothing can misinterpret, it opens on any machine ever built, and it is the right target when the text is what matters and the presentation is not. It inherits every Markdown ambiguity — dialect differences around tables, footnotes and raw HTML — with no benefit over .md.
Why does my Markdown show strange symbols where the accents should be?
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Because a text file does not record which encoding it uses. The bytes are unambiguous; their interpretation is a guess, and a file written as UTF-8 but read as a legacy single-byte encoding turns every accented letter into a pair of symbols. Converting into a format that stores its encoding explicitly fixes it permanently, provided the conversion is told which encoding to read from.
Is Markdown the same format as its other extension?
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Yes. This extension and the longer or shorter name you see alongside it describe one underlying format, and anything that reads either reads both. The two names are historical: an eight-character filename limit from the DOS era, a vendor naming its application rather than its file format, or two programs that simply defaulted differently. Converting either produces the same result, so use whichever extension the software at the other end is expecting.
What happens to line breaks and spacing in a Markdown?
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They are the only structure the file has, so they are taken literally. A hard line break stays a line break instead of becoming a paragraph that reflows, and columns made out of spaces line up only in a monospaced font. Converting into a word processor therefore produces a document that looks like the text file rather than a typeset one — which is honest, and why real layout has to be applied afterwards.
Does a Markdown have fixed pages?
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No — content flows, and pages appear only when something decides on a page size. Change the font, the margins or the screen and the page numbering changes with it. That is why a page reference from a Markdown is unreliable, and why converting to a fixed-layout format is the step that makes page numbers mean something.
Why is a Markdown so much smaller than the same words in a document?
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Because there is nothing else in it. A word-processor file carries styles, fonts, revision history, a compressed package structure and often the images too; a text file carries the characters and the line breaks and stops. A book-length manuscript is a few hundred kilobytes. That is also the reason it survives — there is no version, no renderer and no vendor between you and the words. The long form is what Jekyll, Hugo and several documentation pipelines look for by default, so it fits straight into those builds.
Can I keep editing after converting my Markdown?
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That depends entirely on the target. Converting to another editable document format keeps the structure — styles, headings, tables — so work continues normally. Converting to a page or image format produces something for reading rather than writing, and getting back from there means a second conversion that reconstructs structure rather than restoring it. Keep the Markdown as the working copy either way.
Will formatting marks in a Markdown be interpreted or taken literally?
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That is entirely up to the target. Converting to a format that understands lightweight markup turns the hashes, asterisks and hyphens into real headings, emphasis and lists; converting to one that does not leaves them on the page as punctuation. It is worth being explicit about which you want, because the two results look very different and neither is wrong on its own terms.
Who controls the Markdown format?
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Nobody, and that is the point of it. The specification is public, anyone may implement it without asking or paying, and no company can change the terms later — which is why archives, standards bodies and public institutions specify formats like this one for anything that still has to open in twenty years. The trade is not compatibility, which is excellent; it is that there is no vendor to call when some tool implements the spec badly. Markdown is the same syntax as .md, spelled out in full — some editors and static site generators expect the long extension.
Can I convert a whole folder of Markdown files in one go?
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With an account, yes — drop them in together and they are queued as one job rather than handled one at a time, with the same settings applied across the batch and the results returned together. Free conversions run a single file at a time (merge tools take two); a paid plan is what unlocks batch processing and the larger per-file limit, which is what makes converting a whole archive practical.
What happens to my Markdown file after the conversion?
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It is deleted. The upload and the converted result both sit on the server only as long as the job needs them and are then removed automatically; the transfer runs over HTTPS in both directions. Nobody reads the contents, nothing is indexed, and nothing is passed to anyone else. If you would rather not wait for the automatic sweep, closing the job removes the files immediately.
