.md or .markdown file in here to read it rendered locally in your browser — no software to install. View-only: no editing, no exporting, and the file is never uploaded to a server.or click this area to pick a .md / .markdown file
.md is the extension for Markdown files, sometimes spelled .markdown. It is not a binary format — underneath it is an ordinary plain-text file that follows a very light set of formatting conventions: a hash marks a heading, asterisks mark bold text or list items, backticks mark code. Because it is plain text, a .md file is tiny, Git can diff it line by line, and it never hits the "won't open" or "wrong version" problems that .doc files do. GitHub project READMEs, most technical documentation, and notes from Obsidian or Typora are almost all stored as .md.
Because the file is being shown as raw text, with no rendering step. Those symbols are markup meant for a renderer: once rendered, a hash becomes a large heading and asterisks become bold text and bullet points, while the symbols themselves disappear. Double-clicking into Notepad shows you the markup itself. The file is not corrupted — the rendering step is simply missing.
The other way round: when a list does not come out as a list after rendering, or a table does not come out as a table, the renderer is usually not the problem. The source is ambiguous. A list with no blank line in front of it, or a table whose rows carry different numbers of pipes, renders differently in different tools. In that case use md formatter online, tidy the source up, then come back to this page. That is quicker than guessing line by line where the mistake is.
If you write and keep notes long term, installing Typora, Obsidian or VS Code is the right call — they give you editing, backlinks and plugins. If someone just sent you a .md file and you only want to see what is in it, installing software for that is a poor trade: drop the file onto this page instead, and it renders inside your own browser with no sign-up and no upload. If you then need to hand it to a colleague who doesn't read Markdown, exporting a copy with Markdown to Word / PDF is the easier route.
Phones ship with no app associated with Markdown, so tapping a .md file usually gives you a "cannot open" message, or shows the raw symbols as text. This page works in a mobile browser too: save the .md file from your chat app or cloud drive to the phone, pick it here, and you get the rendered layout.
A .md file is a Markdown file. Underneath it is just plain text, so Notepad opens it fine — you simply see the raw markers such as # and * instead of formatting. To see it laid out properly you would normally install Typora, VS Code, Obsidian or similar. This page saves you that step: drop the .md file in and read the rendered version right in your browser.
No. Both reading the file and rendering the Markdown happen locally in your browser, and the page never uploads your document — which makes it suitable for internal docs, notes and unpublished drafts.
The common GitHub Flavored Markdown constructs are supported: headings, paragraphs, bold, italic, lists, task lists, links, blockquotes, tables, line breaks and code blocks. Advanced syntax such as footnotes, math formulas and Mermaid diagrams may not render the way it does on the platform you wrote it for.
No. This is a view-only reader — all it does is render Markdown into a readable page. If you need to edit and export to Word or PDF in the browser, use the “Markdown to Word / PDF” tool.
Yes. When you open a file in Chrome, Edge or another Chromium-based browser, a “Refresh” button appears next to the file name — save your edits in another editor, click it, and the page re-reads the latest content without you dragging the file in again. This relies on the browser's file system access support, which Firefox, Safari and mobile browsers do not currently offer; there the button stays hidden and you simply pick the file again.
A Markdown file normally stores only the path to an image, not the image itself, and for security reasons the browser cannot read other local files sitting in the same folder. Link to images by URL instead.