Markdown to Medium

Medium does not read Markdown. Paste a document with hash marks and asterisks in it and you get hash marks and asterisks — the editor treats it as ordinary text, which is why writers who draft in Markdown end up reformatting everything by hand.

What Medium does honour is rich text. Copy formatted content from a web page or a word processor and the headings, links, bold and lists arrive intact, because the clipboard carries an HTML version alongside the plain one. This tool writes that HTML version itself: your Markdown is rendered, and the result is placed on the clipboard as formatted text rather than as characters.

That is also why the button says copy rather than download. There is no file to move — the formatting only exists on the clipboard, so the paste has to be the next thing you do.

Not everything survives the trip, and the warnings above are specific about which parts. Tables are the big one: Medium has no table support at all, so rows arrive as loose lines of text. Images are the other, because Medium hosts its own — a linked file will not embed, and each one has to be added in the editor afterwards.

Headings are worth knowing about too. Medium offers two sizes, so anything below H2 lands as a small heading and the distinction between your levels is lost. If a piece leans on three levels of structure, it will read flatter on Medium than in your draft.

Nothing is uploaded. The Markdown is parsed in your browser and the preview is rendered inside a sandboxed frame, so a document containing raw HTML cannot run anything.