Fast, practical, browser-based developer tools
Convert Markdown into clean HTML instantly in your browser. Paste Markdown, render the HTML preview, copy the generated markup, and download it for blogs, documentation, notes, CMS content, landing pages, and publishing workflows.
Markdown is simple to write and easy to read, while HTML is the format most websites and publishing systems rely on. This tool helps you transform headings, lists, links, emphasis, code blocks, and other Markdown syntax into usable HTML with a live preview so you can confirm the output before copying it into your project.
This converter is useful when you write in Markdown but need final HTML for websites, documentation portals, blog editors, emails, templates, or content systems. It gives you a quick way to inspect rendered output and grab clean markup without switching tools.
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Paste your Markdown into the input box and click Convert to HTML. The tool renders the output on the right so you can preview how the HTML will look, then shows the generated markup below for copying or downloading.
# Hello World This is **bold** text. - Item one - Item two [Visit ToolzYard](https://toolzyard.com)
Markdown began in 2004 as John Gruber's format with a deliberately loose description and a permissive reference implementation, which left many cases ambiguous. Different tools filled those gaps differently, so the same Markdown can produce different HTML depending on the converter. CommonMark is the strict specification that pinned the ambiguities down; GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) is CommonMark plus a set of extensions.
The practical result is that several features you may think of as "Markdown" are actually
GFM extensions and will not render in a plain CommonMark converter: tables, task-list
checkboxes (- [ ]), strikethrough with ~~, and automatic linking
of bare URLs. If your output looks right on GitHub but not here — or vice versa — the flavour
difference is usually why.
This is the one that matters for security. By design, Markdown lets you drop raw HTML into a
document, and converters faithfully pass it through to the output. That is convenient when
you write the Markdown yourself, and dangerous when someone else does: a comment, a wiki
page, or a profile bio containing
<img src=x onerror="..."> or a <script> tag becomes
live HTML in your page. Rendering untrusted Markdown without cleaning the result is a classic
stored cross-site-scripting hole.
Conversion and sanitisation are separate jobs. A Markdown-to-HTML converter is not a security filter — GFM offers an optional tag filter for a few dangerous elements, but its own documentation states it is not a substitute for proper sanitisation. If the Markdown comes from users, run the generated HTML through a dedicated sanitiser such as DOMPurify before it reaches the DOM.
The most common "it didn't work" is line breaks. A single newline in Markdown is a
soft break and renders as an ordinary space, not a <br>. To
force a line break you end the line with two trailing spaces or a backslash, or you leave a
blank line to start a new paragraph. This trips up anyone expecting the source layout to be
preserved verbatim.
A few more catch people out. In CommonMark, underscores in the middle of a word do
not create emphasis, so my_variable_name stays literal — but some
older parsers italicise it. Indenting a line by four spaces silently turns it into a code
block. And a line of text immediately followed by a line of --- becomes a
level-two heading (a "setext" heading), which surprises people who meant to draw a
horizontal rule.
The converter escapes the HTML-significant characters in your text — &
becomes &, < becomes < — so plain
prose renders correctly rather than being mistaken for markup. It maps headings, lists,
links, emphasis, and code blocks to their HTML equivalents. What it does not do is impose a
document structure or styling: the output is a fragment of body HTML, not a complete page
with <html>, <head>, or CSS, so you supply those when
you embed it. And, as above, it does not sanitise — treat conversion and safety as two
distinct steps.
GitHub uses GitHub Flavored Markdown, which adds tables, task lists, strikethrough, and bare-URL autolinking on top of CommonMark. A plain CommonMark converter does not render those extensions, so the same source can produce different HTML.
A single newline is a soft break and renders as a space, by design. End the line with
two trailing spaces or a backslash to force a <br>, or use a blank
line to begin a new paragraph.
Not without sanitising the result. Markdown allows raw HTML to pass through, so
user-supplied content can inject <script> or event-handler attributes
— stored XSS. Run the generated HTML through a sanitiser like DOMPurify before inserting
it into the page.
They are GFM extensions, not part of CommonMark. A converter that follows CommonMark
without GFM leaves table pipes and - [ ] checkboxes as literal text. You
need a GFM-capable parser for those.
A line of --- directly under a line of text creates a setext heading rather
than a horizontal rule, and indenting any line by four spaces turns it into a code
block. Both are standard Markdown rules that catch people off guard.
No. Conversion produces a fragment of body markup — headings, paragraphs, lists — not a
complete document with <html>, <head>, or styling.
Wrap it in your own page structure and CSS when you publish it.