HTML to Markdown Converter: Frequently Asked Questions

The converter handles all common semantic HTML tags. Unknown or non-semantic tags (div, span, section, article, aside, nav) have their content extracted and output as plain text with appropriate spacing. Tags used purely for layout with no semantic content (empty divs, wrapper elements) produce empty lines that are collapsed by the 'collapse blank lines' option.

Inline CSS styles (style attributes) are stripped — Markdown has no way to represent CSS colour, font size, or custom styling. The text content is preserved but all visual styling is lost. If your HTML uses style to indicate emphasis (red text for warnings), you may need to manually convert these to Markdown emphasis markers after conversion.

Yes, into GitHub Flavored Markdown pipe table syntax. Note that Markdown tables require all rows to have the same number of columns, and do not support colspan, rowspan, or table headers defined in tbody rather than thead. Complex tables may need manual adjustment after conversion.

Line breaks within pre/code blocks are preserved by the converter. If they are not appearing in the output, check that the original HTML used a pre element (which preserves whitespace) rather than a div or p (which collapses whitespace). Raw HTML from some CMSs may have stripped newlines from code blocks on export.

You can paste the page's HTML source, but the result will include navigation, headers, footers, sidebars, and other structural elements that produce a lot of noise. For web pages, it is better to copy only the article or content area HTML. Browser extensions like 'Markdown Web Clipper' do this extraction automatically.

Both produce identical rendered output. The converter uses - by default as it is visually distinct from the * used for emphasis, making the Markdown source easier to read. You can switch to * in the options if your style guide prefers it.