- Which flavour of Markdown does this render?
- CommonMark, plus the parts of GitHub Flavored Markdown people actually use in a README: pipe tables, task lists with checkboxes, strikethrough with double tildes, fenced code blocks with a language label, and bare URLs turned into links automatically. Setext headings — a title with equals signs or dashes underneath — work too, because plenty of older READMEs are written that way. Footnotes, definition lists, and math blocks are not in yet; they're a small minority of documents and each one is a different dialect.
- Does my document get uploaded anywhere?
- No. The parser runs in your browser, in the page you already loaded. Nothing is posted to a server, which is also why there's no account: there's nothing to attach one to. Your draft is kept in your browser's local storage on your own device, so it survives a reload and a closed tab, and it doesn't follow you to another machine.
- Why is the HTML in my document showing up as text instead of rendering?
- That's deliberate. Markdown technically allows raw HTML inline, and every editor that renders it becomes a place where pasting someone else's README can run their script in your browser. This one escapes HTML in the source and shows it as visible text, and it strips javascript: and data: URLs out of links and images. If what you want is HTML out of Markdown, the Markdown to HTML converter gives you the source code to copy — that's a different job and a different tool.
- What's the difference between this and the Markdown to HTML converter?
- This shows you a rendered document to read; the converter gives you HTML source code to paste somewhere else. Same input, different thing on the right-hand side. If you're checking how a README is going to look, you want this page. If you're pasting the output into a CMS or an email template, you want the converter. There's also an HTML to Markdown tool if you're going the other direction.
- How is reading time worked out?
- Word count divided by 200 words a minute, rounded up, with a floor of one minute for anything that isn't empty. Two hundred is the number most publishers use for adult reading of ordinary prose; technical documents with code in them run slower in practice, so treat it as a floor rather than a promise. The word count itself is Unicode-aware rather than a split on spaces, which matters for Chinese and Japanese text where there are no spaces to split on.
- Does the character count handle emoji correctly?
- Yes. A family emoji like 👨👩👧 is a single character here, even though it's built from several code points joined together — the count uses grapheme segmentation, which is the same thing your cursor uses when it moves through the text one press at a time. Naive counters report that same emoji as eight characters, which is why character limits elsewhere behave so strangely when you paste one in.
- How big a document can it handle?
- Live preview runs up to 100,000 characters, which is roughly a 15,000-word document — far past any README. Past that, the preview stops rather than re-parsing a novel on every keystroke, the message says so, and your text stays exactly where it is and stays editable. A 2,000-character document renders in a handful of milliseconds, so typing never lags behind you.
- Do the two panes scroll together?
- On a wide screen, yes — scrolling either pane moves the other proportionally, so the paragraph you're editing stays roughly opposite the paragraph you're reading. It's proportional rather than line-matched, so a document with a tall image or a long code block will drift a little; that's the honest tradeoff for a sync that never jumps unexpectedly.
- Can I keep more than one document?
- No — one document, one job. Multiple documents mean a file list, and a file list means naming things, deleting things, and eventually an account to sync them. Every big Markdown editor started exactly there and ended up as a workspace you log into. If you need two documents, open two tabs or keep the files on your own disk with the Download button.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Yes. Below 768 pixels the two panes collapse into a Write / Preview toggle over the same document, so nothing is squeezed into a column too narrow to read and there's no sideways scrolling. Tables and code blocks scroll horizontally inside their own box rather than pushing the page wider.
