About Markdown → HTML

Convert Markdown text to HTML with full formatting support. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Converters collection.

Use Cases

• Convert Markdown documentation to HTML for inclusion in a static site generator pipeline.
• Generate email-ready HTML from a Markdown draft without writing raw HTML.
• Produce standalone HTML files from Markdown for offline distribution.
• Convert API documentation written in Markdown to HTML for embedding in a portal.

Tips

• Use 'GitHub-Flavored Markdown' mode to enable tables, task lists, and strikethrough before converting docs intended for GitHub rendering.
• Enable syntax highlighting for code fences — the converter wraps code blocks with highlight.js classes that activate with the CDN script added to the output HTML.
• Check the output's heading structure for accessibility: each page should have one h1, followed by h2/h3 in hierarchical order without skipping levels.

Fun Facts

• The original Markdown.pl script by John Gruber (2004) was only 1,500 lines of Perl. It was intentionally minimal and left many edge cases undefined — the source of all later Markdown flavor divergence.
• CommonMark, the 2014 Markdown standardization effort, required 652 specification tests to cover all ambiguities in the original spec. The most contested feature was how to handle nested lists with inconsistent indentation.
• Pandoc, the universal document converter, can convert Markdown to 40+ output formats including LaTeX, EPUB, DOCX, man pages, and slide presentations — built on top of the same core Markdown parsing standard.

FAQ

Does it output a full HTML document or just a fragment?

Both — fragment mode outputs just the converted HTML body content; full document mode wraps it in a complete HTML5 document with a configurable title, charset, and optional CSS stylesheet link.

Does it support Markdown extensions?

GFM extensions (tables, task lists, strikethrough, autolinks) are supported. Footnotes and definition lists are available as optional extensions.

Is the output sanitized?

Raw HTML embedded in the Markdown source is included by default. Enable 'sanitize HTML' to strip inline HTML, limiting output to elements that Markdown itself can produce — safer for user-submitted content.