Markdown Viewer

What you were seeing, and what you see now

Open a Markdown file in Notepad or TextEdit and you get the source. Here is a realistic fragment, exactly as it sits on disk:

# Onboarding checklist

## Before day one
- [x] Laptop ordered
- [ ] Accounts created
- [ ] Desk assigned

Ask **Dana** in ops if anything is missing, and read the
[handbook](docs/handbook.md) first.

| Item      | Owner | Due    |
| :-------- | :---- | -----: |
| Badge     | Ops   | Day 1  |
| VPN token | IT    | Day 2  |

> Anything marked optional can wait until week two.

What each symbol turned into

That source is readable, which is the whole design goal of the format. It is just not finished. In the viewer above, every symbol became formatting:

• A single # became the document title, and ## a subheading under it.
• The three - [ ] lines became a checklist with real tick boxes.
• **Dana** became bold text.
• The bracket-and-parenthesis pair became a clickable link labelled "handbook".
• The pipe block became a bordered table with the Due column right aligned.
• The final line became an indented quotation.

Symbols are instructions, not clutter

That is the difference between reading a Markdown file and viewing one. The punctuation is not noise to tolerate. It is a set of instructions, and a viewer is simply the thing that follows them.

Want to decode a file by eye instead? The cheat sheet lists every instruction on a single page.

What each platform does with a .md file

The reason .md files feel awkward is that no operating system claims them. Every platform will show you the text. Almost none of them show you the formatting.

Which row you should be living in

The pattern is clear. Reading the text is trivial everywhere, and seeing it formatted needs either a code editor or a browser.

If Markdown is a once-a-month thing for you, a browser tab is the lighter answer. If you handle it several times a week, installing VS Code or a dedicated editor starts to pay for itself.

Tip: Bookmark this page rather than hunting for an app. A viewer you can reach in one tab beats an install you have to justify to your IT department.

What goes wrong, and the fix

A file that looks broken here is usually fine. Two things cause almost all of it: the file was saved oddly, or the Markdown inside it has a small mistake.

Problems with the file itself

• Chinese or accented text appears as garbage. Symptoms like 中文 mean the file was saved in a legacy encoding such as Big5 or Windows-1252. Markdown files are UTF-8 by convention. Re-save the original as UTF-8 in a code editor, then open it here again. Never retype over mojibake, because the underlying bytes are still correct.
• The file is called notes.md.txt. Windows hides known extensions, so a well-meaning "Save as" adds a second one. The contents are untouched. Turn on file name extensions in Explorer's View tab and rename it, or just open it here, since .txt loads exactly the same.
• Images in the document do not appear. Markdown links images by relative path, like ![chart](img/chart.png). When the file travels alone by email, the folder beside it stays behind. The text still renders correctly.

Problems with the Markdown inside

• Half the document is missing. Look for an unclosed code fence. Every line after a stray triple backtick is treated as code, and a correct viewer shows that faithfully. Add the closing fence and everything returns.
• Line breaks seem to collapse. That is not a fault. Markdown joins consecutive lines into one paragraph, and only a blank line starts a new one. A dense source file still renders as tidy paragraphs.
• A table renders as a row of pipe characters. Its delimiter row is missing or malformed, or there is no blank line above the table.
• Some syntax renders and some does not. Task lists, tables, strikethrough and autolinks are GitHub Flavored Markdown, which this viewer supports. So are three extras on top: code fences with a language tag get coloured, $maths$ is typeset with KaTeX, and a mermaid fence is drawn as a diagram. Footnotes and definition lists are separate extensions that this viewer does not implement.

Broken tables are the most common report by a wide margin. Rebuild the grid in the table generator and paste the result back, or read the exact rules in the tables guide first.

Careful: If the pictures are the point of the document, do not ask for the images to be pasted in. Ask the sender for the whole folder, or for a PDF export that carries them inside the file.

From viewing to editing, and back out again

Viewing is often only the first step. Once the file is readable, you usually want to change something, send it on, or turn it into a format the recipient will not question.

To change it

Open the MD Editor on our homepage and paste the contents in. You get the source on the left, a live preview on the right, a formatting toolbar with keyboard shortcuts, and autosave to your own browser storage.

When you are done, download a fresh .md file from the toolbar and send it back the way it came.

To hand it to someone who hates Markdown

• Sending a document? Markdown to PDF gives you a paginated file that opens anywhere with no explanation.
• Publishing it? Markdown to HTML gives you markup for a CMS, an email template or a web page.
• Still deciding? Markdown versus HTML lays out where each format wins.

To stop being on the receiving end

If .md files keep landing in your inbox, ten minutes learning to write them pays off quickly. The syntax is genuinely small, and the complete guide covers all of it in order.

Everything you learn transfers straight to GitHub, Notion, Obsidian, Discord and every chat with an AI assistant. Our FAQ handles the questions people ask on the way in.