# 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](/docs/editor-basics)
- [Exporting a document](/docs/exporting-documents)
- [Code blocks](/docs/how-to-insert-code-blocks)