Pasting Markdown

Paste Markdown as plain text and Workover converts it to formatted rich text. Headings become headings, **bold** becomes bold, lists become lists.

Why this exists

Because of where text comes from now. Ask an assistant for a draft and you get Markdown. Copy from a README, a Linear issue, a Slack message, a notes app — Markdown. Pasted into an editor that does not understand it, all of that arrives as a wall of ## and **, and someone spends ten minutes reformatting by hand.

What is converted

• Headings (# through ######)
• Bold, italic, inline code, strikethrough
• Bulleted, numbered and nested lists
• Links and images
• Blockquotes
• Fenced code blocks, including the language
• Tables
• Horizontal rules

When it does not convert

The detector is deliberately conservative: it converts when the text is clearly Markdown, and leaves it alone otherwise. Pasting a sentence containing an asterisk does not silently turn into emphasis, and pasting a code sample does not get mangled into headings.

If you want the raw characters — you are documenting Markdown itself, say — paste inside a code block and nothing is converted.

Rich text pastes too

Copying from Google Docs, Word or a web page pastes as rich text: the structure survives, the foreign fonts and colours do not. That is the right default, because inherited styling from another tool is the usual cause of a published page that looks subtly wrong.

Going the other way

The document menu copies or downloads the whole document as Markdown, and every published article is available at its .md URL. Useful for handing a piece to an assistant, or for anything that reads better as text than as HTML.

Related

• Editor basics
• Exporting a document
• Code blocks