Markdown Viewer

Sometimes you just need to read a Markdown file the way it's meant to look — a README someone sent you, a note you wrote in plain text, a changelog — without pushing it to GitHub or opening a code editor. This tool renders Markdown to formatted output the instant you type or drop a file in, right in your browser. Nothing is uploaded; the rendering happens locally.

How to use it

Paste Markdown into the box, or click to open a file — it accepts .md, .markdown, and plain .txt. The preview below updates live as the text changes, so you can tweak a heading or list and watch it reflow immediately. When you're happy, Copy HTML puts the converted HTML on your clipboard (handy for pasting into a CMS or email), and Download HTML saves a complete, standalone document.html you can open in any browser.

One rendering quirk to know

This viewer renders with soft line breaks turned on: a single newline becomes an actual line break in the output. That matches how GitHub comments and many chat apps behave, and it's usually what people expect. It differs from strict CommonMark, where a single newline is treated as a space and you'd need two trailing spaces or a blank line to force a break. If your Markdown looks more broken-up here than elsewhere, that setting is why — it's rendering every line the way you typed it.

It's safe to paste anything

Markdown allows raw HTML, which is a security risk if the source isn't yours. This viewer runs the output through a sanitizer that removes <script>, <style>, <iframe>, <object>, <embed>, <link>, and <meta> tags, strips inline event handlers like onclick and onerror, and neutralizes javascript: URLs. So you can drop in a Markdown file from anywhere and read it without a pasted snippet running code in the page.

Images and links

Inline links and images render, but remember the preview isn't hosted at your file's original location. An image referenced by a relative path like ./diagram.png has no folder to resolve against, so it will show as a broken image; only images with full http(s) URLs or embedded data: URIs will actually appear. Links work as written and open normally.

What it doesn't do

This is a viewer, not a full documentation renderer. Standard Markdown — headings, lists, tables, links, images, code blocks, blockquotes — all render, but there's no syntax highlighting theme on code blocks, and no support for math (LaTeX) or diagram extensions like Mermaid. Because raw <script> is stripped, any interactive HTML widget embedded in the Markdown will show as inert markup rather than running. For editing with a side-by-side toolbar, use the Markdown Editor instead.