View Markdown Online

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  • In this tutorial, I will show you how to use Markdown on WordPress.
  • Online markdown editor written by werner robitza // based on wmd // uses jQuery syntax highlighter and icons by Yusuke Kamiyamane // current issues.
  1. See Full List On Markdown-editor.github.io
  2. View Markdown Online Tool
  3. View Markdown Online Excel
  4. View Markdown Online Word

Aug 28, 2020 StackEdit is one of the most popular open-source online Markdown editors available. It provides a great user interface and offers a bunch of useful features. The ability to collaborate, synchronizing capability, and being able to publish/save your files to Blogger, WordPress, GitHub, and a couple other services are some key features that you get with StackEdit. Write your Markdown and see the formatted HTML output instantaneously. I usually write my posts in Markdown format (specifically Showdown).Now it is even more easier and faster to write my content.

A Notepad++ Plugin to view a Markdown file rendered on-the-fly

Features

  • Dockable panel (toggle) with a rendered HTML of the currently selected file/tab
  • CommonMark compliant (0.28)
  • Synchronized scrolling
  • Custom CSS integration
  • HTML and PDF Export
  • Notepad++ Unicode Plugin

Latest Versions

  • 0.8.2
    • Merged a lot of bugfixes and improvements, thanks to monoblaine
    • Updated Markdig to v0.15.0, PDFSharp to v1.50.4845-RC2a and HTMLRenderer accordingly
    • Added a shortcut to Options and About to MarkdownViewerPanel
  • 0.8.1
    • Fixed a bug cutting off text after 10000 characters (#60)
    • Changed parsing of custom CSS to recognize @import statements and have them lead (#35)
  • 0.8.0
    • Changed CommonMark.net converter to Markdig
    • Updated PDFSharp and HTMLRenderer accordingly

Download the latest release here. For a full version history go here.

View markdown online

Installation

Download a release version and copy the included MarkdownViewerPlusPlus.dll to the plugins sub-folder at your Notepad++ installation directory. The plugin adds a small Markdown icon to the toolbar to toggle the viewer as dockable panel.

Plugin Manager

If you have the Plugin Manager installed you can search for MarkdownViewer++ and install it via that plugin.

Compatibility

This plugin requires at least

  • Notepad++ 32-bit/64-bit
  • Windows
  • .NET Framework 4.0 or above

It has been tested under the following conditions

  • Notepad++ 7.5.6 32-bit and 64-bit
  • Windows 10 Professional (64-bit)

Usage

To open the MarkdownViewer++ you can

  • click the toolbar icon ,
  • use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+M
  • or open it via the Plugins sub-menu

To synchronize the scrolling between the Notepad++ editor view and the rendered markdown, you can enable the option via the Plugins sub-menu. The made selection will be stored and loaded in future sessions.

Options

The MarkdownViewer++ offers several options to customize your plugin experience. You can open the options dialog via the Plugins sub-menu.

General

On the General tab you can configure the file extensions the MarkdownViewer++ renderer should actually display. If the box is empty all files will be rendered. If you want to limit the rendering to certain file extensions list them in the textbox as comma-separated list without leading dot.

For example, if you only want to render txt, log and md files just type in “txt,log,md”.

Please note that only file extensions are compared and no certain mime types or anything. If a text document is not named XYZ.txt it will not be rendered.

HTML

On the HTML tab you can fill in Custom CSS, which is used when rendering the MarkdownViewer++ preview as well as the exported HTML. Therefore, you are able to e.g. change bullet-point-list icons or sizes of headlines. The custom CSS textbox is limited to 32767 characters.

PDF

On the PDF tab you can set the orientation and page size of the exported PDF. The content is provided by the PDFSharp enumerations.

Additionally, the margins for top, right, bottom and left can be set for the exported PDF file.

Highlighting

MarkdownViewer++ adds no markdown highlighting to Notepad++ itself. But you might find the user-defined syntax highlighting by Edditoria helpful.

License and Credits

The MarkdownViewerPlusPlus is released under the MIT license.

This Notepad++ plugin integrates the sources of multiple other libraries, because of issues with the library merging process. Credits and thanks to all the developers working on these great projects:

  • The plugin is based on the Notepad++ PluginPack.net by kbilsted provided under the Apache-2.0 license.
  • The renderer uses
    • Markdig by lunet-io provided under the BSD-2-Clause license
    • HTMLRenderer.WinForms by ArthurHub provided under the BSD-3-Clause license
  • The PDF Exporter uses
    • PDFSharp by empira Software GmbH provided under the MIT license
    • HTMLRenderer.PdfSharp by ArthurHub provided under the BSD-3-Clause license
  • The SVG renderer uses SVG.NET by vvvv provided under the Microsoft Public License
  • The menu icons are by FontAwesome provided under the SIL OFL 1.1 license
  • The Markdown icon is by dcurtis provided under the CC0-1.0 license

Disclaimer

This source and the whole package comes without warranty. It may or may not harm your computer or cell phone. Please use with care. Any damage cannot be related back to the author. The source has been tested on a virtual environment and scanned for viruses and has passed all tests.

Personal Note

I don’t know if this is very useful for a lot of people but I wanted something in private to quickly write and see some formatted Markdown documents. As I was not able to find something similar very quickly I created this project. I hope this proves useful to you… with all its Bugs and Issues ;) If you like it you can give me a shout at INsanityDesign or let me know via this repository.

Working with Markdown files in Visual Studio Code is simple, straightforward, and fun. Besides VS Code's basic editing, there are a number of Markdown specific features that will help you be more productive.

FREE

Markdown extensions

In addition to the functionality VS Code provides out of the box, you can install an extension for greater functionality.

Tip: Click on an extension tile above to read the description and reviews to decide which extension is best for you. See more in the Marketplace.

Markdown preview

VS Code supports Markdown files out of the box. You just start writing Markdown text, save the file with the .md extension and then you can toggle the visualization of the editor between the code and the preview of the Markdown file; obviously, you can also open an existing Markdown file and start working with it. To switch between views, press ⇧⌘V (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+V) in the editor. You can view the preview side-by-side (⌘K V (Windows, Linux Ctrl+K V)) with the file you are editing and see changes reflected in real-time as you edit.

Here is an example with a very simple file.

Tip: You can also right-click on the editor Tab and select Open Preview (⇧⌘V (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+V)) or use the Command Palette (⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P)) to run the Markdown: Open Preview to the Side command (⌘K V (Windows, Linux Ctrl+K V)).

Dynamic previews and preview locking

By default, Markdown previews automatically update to preview the currently active Markdown file:

You can lock a Markdown preview using the Markdown: Toggle Preview Locking command to keep it locked to its current Markdown document. Locked previews are indicated by [Preview] in the title:

Markdown

Editor and preview synchronization

VS Code automatically synchronizes the Markdown editor and the preview panes. Scroll the Markdown preview and the editor is scrolled to match the preview's viewport. Scroll the Markdown editor and the preview is scrolled to match its viewport:

You can disable scroll synchronization using the markdown.preview.scrollPreviewWithEditor and markdown.preview.scrollEditorWithPreviewsettings.

The currently selected line in the editor is indicated in the Markdown preview by a light gray bar in the left margin:

Additionally, double clicking an element in the Markdown preview will automatically open the editor for the file and scroll to the line nearest the clicked element.

Outline view

The Outline view is a separate section in the bottom of the File Explorer. When expanded, it will show the symbol tree of the currently active editor. For Markdown files, the symbol tree is the Markdown file's header hierarchy.

The Outline view is a great way to review your document's header structure and outline.

Extending the Markdown preview

Extensions can contribute custom styles and scripts to the Markdown preview to change its appearance and add new functionality. Here's a set of example extensions that customize the preview:

Using your own CSS

You can also use your own CSS in the Markdown preview with the 'markdown.styles': []setting. This lists URLs for style sheets to load in the Markdown preview. These stylesheets can either be https URLs, or relative paths to local files in the current workspace.

For example, to load a stylesheet called Style.css at the root of your current workspace, use File > Preferences > Settings to bring up the workspace settings.json file and make this update:

Keep trailing whitespace in order to create line breaks

To create hard line breaks, Markdown requires two or more spaces at the end of a line. Depending on your user or workspace settings, VS Code may be configured to remove trailing whitespace. In order to keep trailing whitespace in Markdown files only, you can add these lines to your settings.json:

Markdown preview security

For security reasons, VS Code restricts the content displayed in the Markdown preview. This includes disabling script execution and only allowing resources to be loaded over https.

When the Markdown preview blocks content on a page, an alert popup is shown in the top right corner of the preview window:

You can change what content is allowed in the Markdown preview by clicking on this popup or running the Markdown: Change preview security settings command in any Markdown file:

The Markdown preview security settings apply to all files in the workspace.

Here are the details about each of these security levels:

See Full List On Markdown-editor.github.io

Strict

This is the default setting. Only loads trusted content and disables script execution. Blocks http images.

It is strongly recommended that you keep Strict security enabled unless you have a very good reason to change it AND you trust all markdown files in the workspace.

Allow insecure content

Keeps scripts disabled but allows content to be loaded over http.

Disable

Disables additional security in the preview window. This allows script execution and also allows content to be loaded over http.

Snippets for Markdown

There are several built-in Markdown snippets included in VS Code - press ⌃Space (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Space) (Trigger Suggest) and you get a context specific list of suggestions.

Tip: You can add in your own User Defined Snippets for Markdown. Take a look at User Defined Snippets to find out how.

Compiling Markdown into HTML

VS Code integrates with Markdown compilers through the integrated task runner. We can use this to compile .md files into .html files. Let's walk through compiling a simple Markdown document.

View Markdown Online Tool

Step 1: Install a Markdown compiler

For this walkthrough, we use the popular Node.js module, markdown-it.

Note: There are many Markdown compilers to choose from beyond markdown-it. Pick the one that best suits your needs and environment.

Step 2: Create a simple MD file

Open VS Code on an empty folder and create a sample.md file.

Note: You can open a folder with VS Code by either selecting the folder with File > Open Folder or navigating to the folder and typing 'code .' at the command line.

Place the following source code in that file:

Step 3: Create tasks.json

The next step is to set up the task configuration file tasks.json. To do this, run Terminal > Configure Tasks and click Create tasks.json file from templates. VS Code then presents a list of possible tasks.json templates to choose from. Select Others since we want to run an external command.

This generates a tasks.json file in your workspace .vscode folder with the following content:

To use markdown-it to compile the Markdown file, change the contents as follows:

Tip: While the sample is there to help with common configuration settings, IntelliSense is available for the tasks.json file as well to help you along. Use ⌃Space (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Space) to see the available settings.

Step 4: Run the Build Task

Since in more complex environments there can be more than one build task we prompt you to pick the task to execute after pressing ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B) (Run Build Task). In addition, we allow you to scan the output for compile problems. Since we only want to convert the Markdown file to HTML select Never scan the build output from the presented list.

At this point, you should see an additional file show up in the file list sample.html.

If you want to make the Compile Markdown task the default build task to run execute Configure Default Build Task from the global Terminal menu and select Compile Markdown from the presented list. The final tasks.json file will then look like this:

Automating Markdown compilation

Let's take things a little further and automate Markdown compilation with VS Code. We can do so with the same task runner integration as before, but with a few modifications.

View Markdown Online Excel

Step 1: Install Gulp and some plug-ins

We use Gulp to create a task that automates Markdown compilation. We also use the gulp-markdown plug-in to make things a little easier.

We need to install gulp both globally (-g switch) and locally:

Note: gulp-markdown-it is a Gulp plug-in for the markdown-it module we were using before. There are many other Gulp Markdown plug-ins you can use, as well as plug-ins for Grunt.

You can test that your gulp installation was successful by typing gulp -v. You should see a version displayed for both the global (CLI) and local installations.

Step 2: Create a simple Gulp task

Open VS Code on the same folder from before (contains sample.md and tasks.json under the .vscode folder), and create gulpfile.js at the root.

View Markdown Online Word

Place the following source code in that file:

What is happening here?

  1. We are watching for changes to any Markdown file in our workspace, i.e. the current folder open in VS Code.
  2. We take the set of Markdown files that have changed, and run them through our Markdown compiler, i.e. gulp-markdown-it.
  3. We now have a set of HTML files, each named respectively after their original Markdown file. We then put these files in the same directory.

Step 3: Run the gulp default Task

To complete the tasks integration with VS Code, we will need to modify the task configuration from before to run the default Gulp task we just created. You can either delete the tasks.json file or empty it only keeping the 'version': '2.0.0' property. Now execute Run Task from the global Terminal menu. Observe that you are presented with a picker listing the tasks defined in the gulp file. Select gulp: default to start the task. We allow you to scan the output for compile problems. Since we only want to convert the Markdown file to HTML select Never scan the build output from the presented list. At this point, if you create and/or modify other Markdown files, you see the respective HTML files generated and/or changes reflected on save. You can also enable Auto Save to make things even more streamlined.

If you want to make the gulp: default task the default build task executed when pressing ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B) run Configure Default Build Task from the global Terminal menu and select gulp: default from the presented list. The final tasks.json file will then look like this:

Step 4: Terminate the gulp default Task

The gulp: default task runs in the background and watches for file changes to Markdown files. If you want to stop the task, you can use the Terminate Task from the global Terminal menu.

Next steps

Read on to find out about:

  • CSS, SCSS, and Less - Want to edit your CSS? VS Code has great support for CSS, SCSS, and Less editing.

Common questions

Is there spell checking?

Not installed with VS Code but there are spell checking extensions. Check the VS Code Marketplace to look for useful extensions to help with your workflow.

Does VS Code support GitHub Flavored Markdown?

No, VS Code targets the CommonMark Markdown specification using the markdown-it library. GitHub is moving toward the CommonMark specification which you can read about in this update.

In the walkthrough above, I didn't find the Configure Task command in the Command Palette?

You may have opened a file in VS Code rather than a folder. You can open a folder by either selecting the folder with File > Open Folder or navigating to the folder and typing 'code .' at the command line.