Markdown
Writablemarkup
Markdown was created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz circa 2004. The purpose of Markdown is to let users write clean text-based documents that do not suffer from the legibility issues of other 'markup' formats. Markdown uses combinations of characters, for example, hashes (pound-sign), asterisks, and combination of square- and rounded- brackets to prefix or suffix parts of text. The symbols provide instructions to an interpreter. A single hash '#' for example, that prefixes a line of text is an instruction to make that line a top-level header in a formatted document. Two hashes '##' is an instruction to render, or output, a secondary header. And so on. Ultimately the result of writing markdown is a document that can be parsed into a well-formed version of other presentation languages such as HTML or XHTML. There is no single specification for Markdown, nor is there a single canonical output. That is, Markdown syntax could be converted into many other file types. Further descriptions of the background of Markdown and a list of Markdown 'flavors' can be found on the Archiveteam Just Solve It File Formats Wiki: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Markdown Wikipedia also provides a thorough description of Markdown and its syntax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#Standardization
Identify it
| Extensions | .md.markdown.mdown.markdn.mdtext.mdtxt.mdwn.mkd.mkdn |
|---|---|
| MIME types | text/markdowntext/x-markdown |
| PRONOM | fmt/1149 |
| Wikidata | Q1193600 |
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Open it
- ApostropheOpen source
- LibreOffice WriterOpen source
- MarkEditOpen source
- PandocOpen source
- PandocOpen source
- Q138325607Open source
- Q141674354Open source
- QOwnNotesOpen source
- vimwikiOpen source
- VisiDataOpen source
- VYMOpen source
- CaddyOpen source
- IntelliJ IDEAOpen source
- InvenioOpen source
- jEditOpen source
- mdcatOpen source
- OkularOpen source
- PygmentsOpen source
- Q1122464Open source
- QScintillaOpen source
- showdownjsOpen source
- SubEthaEditOpen source
- Translate ToolkitOpen source
- VivaldiOpen source
Convert it
| To | With | Fidelity | Command and losses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ePub Format | Pandoc | Partial | pandoc -f commonmark -t epub in.md -o out.epubDocument structure is kept; layout, styles and unsupported elements are lost. |
| Hypertext Markup Language | Pandoc | Partial | pandoc -f commonmark -t html in.md -o out.htmlDocument structure is kept; layout, styles and unsupported elements are lost. |
| Office Open XML Wordprocessing Document, ECMA-376 1st Edition | Pandoc | Partial | pandoc -f commonmark -t docx in.md -o out.docxDocument structure is kept; layout, styles and unsupported elements are lost. |
| OpenDocument | Pandoc | Partial | pandoc -f commonmark -t odt in.md -o out.odtDocument structure is kept; layout, styles and unsupported elements are lost. |
| Plain Text File | Pandoc | Partial | pandoc -f commonmark -t plain in.md -o out.txtText only: all formatting is dropped. |
Sources
From Converters (FFmpeg, ImageMagick, Pandoc, LibreOffice), Just Solve the File Format Problem (File Formats Wiki), PRONOM, Wikidata. Updated 2026-10-24.