I work on a Markdown-like extension, and I'm adding a way to put a vector graphic directly in a document instead of referencing an external file. Before I lock the defaults I'd like a sanity check from people who write a lot of Markdown.

The syntax is a fence:

```img
<svg viewBox="0 0 24 24">
  <path fill="currentColor" d="M12 2l2.9 6.3 6.9.8-5.1 4.6z"/>
</svg>
```

The body gets sanitized first (script elements, event handlers, foreignObject, javascript: URLs and external references are all stripped), and then it is rendered one of two ways.

Default: sandboxed. The cleaned SVG is encoded into a data:image/svg+xml URI on an <img> tag. The browser sandboxes that: no script, no network requests, no access to the surrounding page. It holds even if my sanitizer turns out to have a bug, which is exactly why it's the default.

Source next to what it renders to: https://i.postimg.cc/kX4FnJS0/1-sandbox-default.png

Opt-in: inline. The cleaned SVG is emitted as a real <svg> element in the page, so currentColor and normal CSS (including dark mode) apply to it. That's what people actually want for icons. The cost is that the sanitizer becomes the only thing standing between the document and the DOM. It gets switched on by the application embedding the renderer, never by the document itself, so a document can't promote its own content out of the sandbox.

I think the main advantages and why I wanted this in the first place:

• The graphic travels with the document. No asset folder, no broken relative paths, one file you can paste anywhere and share easily.
• It diffs. A changed icon shows up as readable lines in git instead of "binary file changed".
• Nothing is fetched at render time, so it works offline and can't phone home.
• The alternative people reach for today is raw HTML passthrough, which would require way more sanitizing and whitelisting (also of elements). This is strictly safer than that.

What I'm unsure about:

1. Is putting image source inside a text document reasonable at all, or does it wreck the plain-text readability that makes Markdown worth using in the first place?
2. If you'd use it: is sandboxed-only good enough, or is theming (the icon following your page's text color) the entire point, making a sandbox-only version pointless?
3. What do you do today? Commit SVG files next to the document, paste base64 data URIs, drop into raw HTML, or just avoid inline vector graphics?

Would this be something you could see yourself using?
Or for easier communication with AI even, maybe, once it learned this extension? Since all is inside one stream/file.

I know there are also risks of enlarging the document too much, depending on the images.
Just wondering if I missed a good argument for or against it before I actually merge my POC.

I recently built **Page to Markdown**, a free Chrome extension that converts web pages—or only the content you select—into clean, structured Markdown.

It was created to make everyday research, documentation, note-taking, and AI-assisted workflows faster and simpler.

Instead of manually copying content, removing navigation, fixing broken formatting, and rebuilding headings or lists, the extension lets you capture useful content in a few clicks.

# What is Page to Markdown?

**Page to Markdown** is a browser extension that converts web content into a ready-to-use `.md` file while preserving useful structure such as:

* Headings
* Lists
* Tables
* Links
* Code blocks
* Quotes
* Structured page content

You can then paste the result into:

* GitHub
* Obsidian
* Notion
* Documentation platforms
* Research notes
* Pull requests
* AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude

# Three ways to capture content

**Main Content**

Removes navigation menus, advertisements, sidebars, and footers while keeping the main article or page content.

**Full Page**

Converts the complete visible page into Markdown. This is useful for websites that do not have a clearly defined article structure.

**Selection**

Highlight a paragraph, table, code example, or specific section and convert only that selected content.

# YAML front matter support

The extension can optionally add YAML front matter containing useful metadata such as:

---
title: "Page title"
source: "https:// example com"
captured: "2026-07-13"
---

This is particularly useful for Obsidian users, researchers, developers, content creators, and anyone building a structured personal knowledge base.

# Built for a better user experience

The goal was not only to create another Markdown converter, but to make the capture process feel quick and natural.

You can:

* Copy Markdown directly to your clipboard
* Download a dated `.md` file
* Right-click and choose **Copy Selection as Markdown**
* Open the extension using `Alt + Shift + M`
* Keep the original source URL and page metadata through YAML

# Free and privacy-first

The extension is completely free to use.

It was developed with privacy and responsible software design in mind:

* No servers
* No analytics
* No user accounts
* No background page monitoring
* No network requests
* No unnecessary host permissions

All conversion happens locally inside your browser.

The extension only accesses the page when you choose to run it, and the generated content goes only to your clipboard or Downloads folder.

# Open source and built for a good cause

The repository is public for anyone who wants to inspect the code, contribute, report issues, suggest improvements, or learn from the implementation.

I developed it as a small community-focused project: useful software should not always need a subscription, an account, or the collection of personal data.

Try it here:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/fhijjebpfmoekacokgmpokikjacagpkh?utm_source=item-share-cb

I would genuinely appreciate feedback from developers, researchers, writers, students, Obsidian users, and anyone working with Markdown or AI tools.

# A little about the technical side

The extension is built using the Chrome Extensions platform and performs Markdown conversion entirely within the browser.

The core workflow includes:

* Content extraction from the active tab
* Main-content detection
* Selected-text capture
* HTML-to-Markdown conversion
* YAML metadata generation
* Clipboard integration
* Local `.md` file creation
* Minimal-permission browser access

GitHub link: [https://github.com/lakshithalk/page-to-markdown](https://github.com/lakshithalk/page-to-markdown))

The repository is public, and contributions, bug reports, feature requests, and technical feedback are welcome.

I'm looking for a Markdown editor/converter that processes everything locally. Most online tools I've tried require uploading files to a server, which isn't ideal for confidential documents.

My ideal requirements are:

• No file uploads
• Browser-based or desktop
• Local processing
• PDF export
• Open source is a plus

Does anyone have recommendations or experience with tools that meet these requirements?

The problem I kept running into: I write a lot in markdown, but I’m not a “commit early, commit often” person about my own notes. I just want to write, and if I mess something up or want to see what a note looked like a week ago, I want that to just… work. Most tools either have no history at all, or make you think about Git to get it.

So knowdust keeps every note in a per-user Git repo behind the scenes, but you never touch Git directly — you just write, and full version history is there if you ever need to look back or restore something.

What it actually does right now:

- Clean markdown editor (Monaco-based, so it feels like writing code but for prose)
- Automatic, invisible version history — no manual commits, no learning curve

What it doesn’t do (yet): team features are waitlist-only, and I’m sure there are rough edges I haven’t found because I’m still one person testing this against my own daily use.

I’m not going to pretend this is fully polished — it’s a real solo project, still evolving, and I’d genuinely rather hear “this is missing X” now than after I’ve built more on top of a wrong assumption.

Happy to answer anything about the stack or why I made specific choices.

I build developer tools, mostly editors, and markdown is the one I kept coming back to

because I use it every day for readme files and notes.

The thing that bothered me was never the editing. It was that every markdown app I tried

wanted an account first, then wanted to sync my files through someone else's server so I

could open them on a laptop. For a plain text file sitting on a device I already own,

that always felt backwards.

So the main thing in MDVEdit is a local server. Your phone hosts the document over your

own wifi, you open a url in any desktop browser, and you type there with two way live

sync. The file never leaves the phone. No account, no cloud, nothing uploaded.

Around that it's a normal markdown editor. Split live preview, syntax highlighting,

mermaid diagrams rendered on device, export to styled HTML and PDF, version history so

every save is snapshotted, presentation mode that turns a document into slides, and

biometric lock for private notes.

One thing I should be straight about, the free version has ads. I'd rather say that here

than have you find it three taps in. They're what pays for it staying offline with no

account and no subscription.

What I'd actually like feedback on is whether the live server flow makes sense to you or

whether it's a solution to a problem only I have. That's the part I'm least sure about.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cosmovex.mdvedit\](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cosmovex.mdvedit)

Hey guys. I see a lot of you are looking for a good, cross-platform, rich-text-capable MD editor, so I wanted to share the one I built. Its as rich-text compatible as you can get for something that wasn't built to necessarily be that way (referring to markdown).

Some notable things:

• Rich text & raw MD edit modes
• Win 10 & 11, Linux (Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora, etc), MacOS across new and old architectures.
• Fully interactive view mode for just viewing & navigating.
• Automatic table of contents with navigation
• Large file handling 25mb+ via Outline Mode (500k lines - Fully tested - sub-ten second load for the outlines table of contents - Edit per sections. [rich text and preview disabled])
• Tabbed windows with tear-out
• Cross-mode edit history for maintained undo and redo (Raw and RT have separate histories)
• All external images and links blocked by default in preview and edit modes.
• HTML sanitization for security on all views
• AI-capable but off by default [Ollama for Local - OpenRouter for Cloud] (For privacy). - Helps with things like rewrites, edits, or even full document creation.

That's just to name a few. I actually built it for myself and use it everyday. I'm also a perfectionist so please if you find anything that doesn't, let me know. I use this daily but figured I'd share it as others seem to be looking for things like it.

I'm hope this isn't consider self-promotion, as I am not trying to make money or anything. Really just see the gap.

Here is the project details for more insight: https://www.jonbarnes.dev/projects/0d209f10-3d54-47b5-be95-2e109e0e63e0

Download: https://releases.jonbarnes.dev/

This tool now runs on Windows in addition to Linux and Mac OS. In addition, one user is using it on his website for his lectures. This isn't the first time he's requested an improvement to the tool so he can use it for his purposes. As a result, the ability to disable file editing has been added so he can make the files public.

You might also find this Markdown viewer interesting.

I use AI and Markdown a lot for research and writing, but once I have multiple sources, notes, and drafts, it gets hard to see how everything fits together in a chat or linear editor.

So I put together a visual Markdown editor where files live on a 2D canvas. I can arrange the context visually and work with it using the ChatGPT or Claude subscription I already have. The desktop app can also access local files.

Everything stays Markdown-compatible, so I can still use the files outside the canvas.

You can try it here (it's free to use!):

arky.so

I have always loved Wikitext and markdown for the ease with which you can apply formatting.

I've always hated the way bullets and other formatting behave in Microsoft products.

You can put the cursor between two words with different formatting, and deliberately place it on the side of the space against the word where you want new typed text to match that formatting, and it'll instead pick up formatting from the other text. There's a ton of similar quirks with how bullets work that make them infuriating.

Now they are leaking that fucking nonsense into markdown editors. In VS 2022, if you hit enter at the end of bulleted text that has been indented once, it automatically adds an additional indentation one level deeper! What kind of idiotic nonsense is that? If you wanted to do something automatically, then it should be at the same level.

Better yet, DO NOTHING! The whole point of markdown is it's so effortless you can just hit space or tab a couple times and dash and get what you want.

What's worse, is in this scenario they insert a tab character, even if you have the IDE configured for tab=>2 spaces. So visually I think, oh I'll hit backspace 4 times to clear the spacespacedashspace, but guess what, the character preceding the dash is a tab, so you pretty much need to clear the entire line and start over. Their "features" waste more time than they save.

So for anyone out there making markdown editors, there should be distinct modes for raw text editing and modes that help you format. Cause some of us don't want that horse shit.

is there a converter for markdown to convert to a .pdf or any other output while keeping my tabs? i use gentoo linux and i edit my .md in neovim for homework to put headings and stuff and when i use pandoc or groff they either dont recognise my tabs/new lines or headings and ive seen suggestions on lowdown and stuff but idk ik groff is customisable but idk what to use they dont work by default

The closest I can find to true WYSIWYG, word processor, is, stupidly, a plugin for VSCode.
But at least in that (Markdown for Humans, name is spot on), I never see a single piece of markdown syntax code. Never.

All I wanted was a small, standalone app without the baggage of VSCode. VScode is not an app for quickly editing Mardown files in small windows from various locations on disk. It's full environment. It's unwieldy.

AFAICT, nothing exists, I have spent days searching.

All apps that claim to be WYSIWYG are either
- not true file editors, they want to store notes in their own internal database. I want files on a dirve
- split pane. I just want to see word processor window, not two windows
- They LOOK like WYSIWYG but as soon as you start moving around a document a HEADING suddenly becomes a ###HEADING and it slides to the right under your eyeballs, putting you off your flow.

DAYS. Days looking for a true WYSIWYG Markdown app, and... nothing.

Someone PLEASE prove me wrong. Where is this unicorn app??

EDIT
Some genuinely helpful people in the comments - and a LOT of trolls.
ItS a SkIlL iSsUe
tHaT's NoT wHaT mArKdOwN iS fOr
Neither of which address the question. Rather an attempt to berate me for even asking the question, how dare I not want to the see the code, how dare I simply want to edit text with logical formatting but not give myself a headache and squints from all the shifting text and appearing/disappearing syntax markers.

If you don't have a constructive answer, why comment?
Oh right... it's REDDIT

I kept wanting a simple way to just read my Markdown files — not edit them, not preview one at a time in an editor pane, but actually browse a whole folder of notes/docs like a little website. So I made MarkdownBlaze. It's free, open source (MIT), and works completely offline.

You point it at a .md file and it renders a clean, readable document with a sidebar and navigation. What it does:

Rendering - Full CommonMark plus tables, task lists, footnotes, and auto-linked headings - Syntax highlighting for code blocks (~190 languages, light/dark aware) - Mermaid diagrams — flowcharts, sequence diagrams, etc. render live from ```mermaid blocks - Admonitions / callouts in both Docusaurus (:::tip) and MkDocs (!!! note) styles - YAML front matter is parsed and hidden instead of dumped on the page - Local images just work (embedded inline)

Navigation — this is the part I actually use daily - Click a link to another .md file and it opens in-app — so a folder of docs behaves like a wiki - Smart links: extension-less links find the right .md, and folder links open that folder's index.md - External links open in your normal browser - Back / Forward history + a persisted history of everything you've opened

Reading experience - Resizable, pinnable sidebar with three tabs: document outline (headers), this session's history, and global history - Light / Dark / System themes - Auto-refresh — save the file in your editor and the view updates instantly, so you can write in one window and read in this one - Keyboard shortcuts for back/forward, refresh, print, and toggling the sidebar

Everything runs offline — no accounts, no network, nothing phones home. Works on Windows and Linux and MacOS.

• Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/9P9VDVST2980?cid=DevShareMRDPCS
• Source (MIT): https://github.com/bwets/MarkdownBlaze

It comes with a sample docs folder that doubles as a feature tour, so you can see everything in a couple of clicks. Would love feedback on what's missing — happy to hear feature requests.

Website: https://smalldocs.org

Github: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs

Hi everyone,

I'm a business guy turned software engineer. Since Opus 4.5 it became clear to me that "business work" as well as software engineering works benefits from an agent helping you out.

I felt frustrated that while I had a super-fast agent working with me, I was still iterating on crusty old document formats (Word, PPT, Excel, PDF). I wanted a document format to exist which felt more in sync with my agent workflows.

SmallDocs (https://smalldocs.org) is my implementation. It let's your agent create easy-to-read (with considered default styles) 100% private documents (see the explainer video for how we achieve privacy).

These documents are not isolated to one "format" - a single SmallDoc can contain slides, text, charts and spreadsheets. This is particularly useful for data analysis work, where it's useful to combine analysis (text) and data (charts and spreadsheets) - e.g. this SmallDoc on top dividend shares: https://smalldocs.org/s/NpeOXG8_WSPoAwWGhiug0w#k=zjHDahAIzDjQCRSeX9ufIwbSjgWlIZPLLpmGFieDXfY.

Although this started off as an office suite for agents, 90% of my use is not about creating office documents, it's for improving my understanding during agentic software engineering. After a day's work I have too many Claude Code terminal windows to count. It's useful for me to tell Claude "sdoc me a rundown of this plan", or "sdoc me a mermaid diagram of your proposed architecture", and escape the visual and spatial limitations of the terminal.

Because the terminal has replaced my IDE, I also added a feature for you to be able to sdoc code files (https://smalldocs.org/s/2gp4qjDjqfVdtxWCXyJxLG#k=hnjiCNDTcYdyohdWPbw_zFghcUdC7XIkMBdEogbcrFg), which also allows your agent to annotate a flow of business logic across one or more files (https://smalldocs.org/s/SvAfWFYuGXSDs26OKMThz_#k=vMwRvvC8OBB0ClIQAnST-LPxXfwoGKF9oWDzeaafyMw).

Open for pull requests and any feedback.

Thanks for checking it out!

Hi,

to solve my problem of having to wait long times for my CI to generate hundreds of simple PDF's I made a small native Markdown-to-PDF converter written in C++17 - RayoMD (website is in works).

The goal was simple - convert markdown to pdf as fast as possible without browser with as little resource as possible and maybe stamp it or make it reversable. With a lot of help of newest AI models** and my knowledge of PDF and optimisations - I made it possible to convert md to pdf in 15-19ms per file! When compared to other tools that I used It is incredible how much money I can save on my CI workers.

RayoMD generates PDF bytes directly from native code. It supports headings, paragraphs, lists, block quotes, fenced code blocks, tables, links, local images, Unicode fonts, page breaks, batch conversion, stdin input, and a warm server mode.

It is not a full pandoc or md-to-pdf replacement but a simpler and faster tool.

I’d especially appreciate feedback on:

• Markdown constructs you consider essential
• documents that break the parser or renderer
• benchmark methodology
• Linux and Windows compatibility
• output quality compared with your current workflow

The project is Apache-2.0 licensed, and releases are available for Windows and Linux.

Repository:

https://github.com/Butterski/rayomd

Website and benchmark overview:

https://butterski.github.io/rayomd-website/

* “Fastest” refers only to the standalone Markdown-to-PDF tools, platforms, document sets, and fresh-process workloads included in my published benchmark. It is not a claim of equivalent Markdown coverage or identical rendering quality. I’d be happy to add other comparable tools or independently submitted benchmark results.

In my current Windows benchmarks, RayoMD converts typical documents in roughly 15–19 ms per file, compared with approximately:

• 1.7–2.3 seconds for md-to-pdf
• 3.2–3.4 seconds for Pandoc + XeLaTeX

** The work was 80% done by AI. I made all big research moves and optimisation methods that I implemented in my professional life. The small code tweaks and fixes were done by hand. Of course AI did most of the coding job with my professional assistance. I liked how easly I could write tests with It so without AI there would be none propably.

Hi all

As the title says

I am working with markdowm more these days.
But one thing really bugs me about the editors.
You click on a line, like a heading. It looks just like a heading...
But as soon as your cursor is on it.

THIS HEADING
becomes
### THIS HEADING ### and when you move the cursor down it jumps back to
THIS HEADING again.

I don't want to see that. I don't ever want to see any markdown code, at all. I don't want to see little asterisks appearing and disappearing as I move through bold text. I don't want hashes sliding the headline to the right when my cursor touches them.

It's giving me a headache.

Are there any good Markdown editors that will behave just like Textedit or another docs editor? Where I literally never have to see or care about markup code at all?

Please god I am begging you all
Thanks

Edit:
WYSIWG html editors since the early 2000s had the ability to edit a webpage without a bunch of html code magically appearing each time you try to edit something. What's with the markdown apps' obsession with surfacing the code then making it disappear again?
EIther you want code edit,
Or you want text edit and use shortcuts like cmd+2 for a heading, command+b for bold. Not both? Please get the heck out of here with the stupid code appearing and disappearing and making it impossible to edit the TEXT because suddenly the hashes and asterisks appeared in front of the text you actually wanted to edit. OMG

EDIT 2:
Even Typora does this. Highlight bold text, BING suddenly the rest of the text on the line slides under my eyeballs, making my brain itch, because four little asterisks have popped up around the text I just highlighted. NO. Don't move the text as I am reading, highlighting, and editing. Why does NO paid or free option exist to NEVER SEE THE MARKDOWN CODE

I'm building this tool to scratch my own itch, it's far from ready, but it's starting to take shape. I know there's a bazillion md readers but this might be a bit different (or not).

It's not meant to cover general notes usage, but more geared towards facilitating the learning process. Of course, nothing stops the users from doing whatever.

Cross-OS but no browser (read: native). Bonus: It comes with an FPS counter 😂

Obsidian-style UX. This is taking me forever because there's a bazillion edge cases building the editor from scratch while setting a high bar for a good Obsidian-like experience. Keeping the performance blazing is also a pain, but worth it.

Nested embedded documents (not 100% ready yet).

Math, Diagrams, Tables, Code, Images. Video support not there yet. Will have a way to make fancy embeddable presentations/animations.

Of course, there's AI integration to massage your docs. You can use your ChatGPT sub, or for technical users basically the CLI harnesses that you have installed in your machine.

Whenever it's ready, it's naturally going to be the same deal as Obsidian: free.

Is there any feature you would want in a learning-geared editor? I've more or less covered my needs, but I'm sure there are useful things I am missing here.

Whenever someone asks for a Markdown app, Obsidian is usually the default answer. But I kept running into a much more boring use case: I have a README, an exported conversation, some project documentation, or a random .md file someone sent me. I don’t want to turn its folder into a vault or open an entire note-taking system. I just want to double-click the file, read it, maybe fix something, and close it.

And I want that interaction to feel immediate.

So I built Hashdraft, a focused Markdown reader and editor for Windows.

A lot of the work went into speed and responsiveness.

It’s closer to what I always wished the default Windows app for .md files was.

Any feedback is welcome.

I built this while working on the admin page for my website.

I needed a simple way to edit Markdown without switching between separate editor and preview panels. I wanted something similar to Obsidian’s Live Preview: the document appears formatted, but the underlying content remains directly editable Markdown.

So I built react-inline-markdown-editor, a reusable React component powered by CodeMirror 6.

Markdown syntax markers such as "#", "\*\*", and backticks stay hidden while reading and appear when the cursor moves onto that line. The Markdown string remains the source of truth, so it can be stored and rendered however the application needs.

It currently supports:

\- Headings, bold, italic and strikethrough

\- Links, images and blockquotes

\- Ordered and unordered lists

\- Inline and fenced code

\- GitHub Flavored Markdown

\- Light and dark themes

\- A controlled React component API

I originally made it for my own admin interface, but I decided to publish it as an open-source package in case it is useful for other CMSs, documentation tools, dashboards or note-taking applications.

GitHub:

https://github.com/anasyd/react-inline-markdown-editor

Project page:

https://www.anasyd.com/Projects/4f65872c-de07-42f6-b8db-4b83c56ac04e

Test it here:

https://www.anasyd.com/MD

I would appreciate feedback on the editing experience and component API. Are there any Markdown features or behaviours you would expect from something like this?

Not sure if this is the correct place to ask, but figured I'd try. I currently use Excel (put down the pitchforks!) to keep track of my daily tasks at work. It has columns like: * Date * Day of week * Month/year * Project * Area * Task

It is easy to quickly add a row when I do X. It would be nice to have this in markdown in VS Code, less overhead. But what is the best way to structure it? I have a few years of data. That seems overload for a table. Should I split it by year or year/month? Does anyone do something similar with VS Code?