M↓Markdown to HTML

The single thing that trips people up: a single line break does nothing.

Markdown treats one newline as a continuation of the same paragraph. Two lines of text with one break between them come out as a single paragraph, which is not what anyone expects the first time. Leave a blank line between paragraphs.

What is supported

Core Markdown: hash headings to six levels, unordered lists with dashes, asterisks or plus signs, numbered lists, bold and italic, inline code and fenced code blocks, links, blockquotes and horizontal rules.

Special characters in your prose are escaped as they convert, so an ampersand or an angle bracket becomes valid markup rather than breaking the output.

What is not

Tables, footnotes, task lists and strikethrough. All four are GitHub Flavoured Markdown extensions rather than part of the original syntax, which is why a table that renders perfectly in your editor produces nothing here.

For tables specifically, writing the HTML directly is usually faster than finding a converter that handles them.

Pasting into WordPress

Use the code editor or a custom HTML block. Dropping HTML into the visual editor sometimes escapes it, and you end up with your tags displayed as text on the published page.

Why bother with Markdown

It stays readable as plain text, works in version control, and never traps your writing in a proprietary format. Notes written in Markdown a decade ago open in any editor today, which is not true of most word processor files from the same period.