Upload a Markdown file, preview it locally in your browser and export it to Word or PDF. Nothing is uploaded.
Wondering what opens a .md file? Drop a .md / .markdown file here and read it right in your browser, nothing to install. View-only: no editing, no exporting, no uploads.
A Markdown file is just plain text: # marks a heading, - marks a list item, and ** marks bold. It opens fine in Notepad — you just see the raw text with its symbols rather than a laid-out page. Because it is plain text, the files are tiny, Git can diff them properly, and they will still open in ten years even if some particular application stops being maintained. That is exactly why developer documentation, open-source READMEs and more and more note-taking apps use it. The price is that when you double-click one, Windows usually has no idea what to open it with.
That is the only fork in the road here. If you have simply been handed a README or someone's exported notes and want to read them through, use the viewer: drop the file in and it appears laid out immediately, with no edit mode — so the question "might I accidentally break someone else's file?" never arises. If you need to hand the document on — to a colleague who only has Office, as an attachment, or to print it — then you need to convert it to Word or PDF.
Heading levels, lists, bold and italic, links, tables, block quotes and images all survive intact. What you do lose is mainly syntax highlighting in code blocks (in Word they usually become plain monospaced text) and some Markdown extensions — task-list checkboxes, footnotes, formulas. If the document is heavy on mathematical notation, a PDF export normally stays closer to the original than a Word one.
Parsing Markdown and generating Word / PDF can both be done entirely inside the browser; not one step of it has to happen on a server. The benefit is not only privacy: with no upload there is no file-size limit, no queue and no "you have used up today's free quota", and the page keeps working with the network disconnected. Work documents, drafts that are not published yet, internal material — none of it has to be handed to a server you know nothing about first.