TXT to MD Converter

Years of notes in .txt files are one step away from a Markdown vault or a documentation folder. Convert them to .md with clean paragraphs, UTF-8 encoding and the line endings your tools expect.

or drop PDF, DOC, DOCX … files here ·

Max 95 MB per file· Up to 20 files· Deleted after 30 minutes

Output

Convert to

Formatting

Files are processed on our servers and deleted after 30 minutes.

How to use this tool

1
Upload the text files
Add up to 20 .txt notes at a time, each up to 95 MB.
2
Check encoding and line endings
Convert to is Markdown, Text encoding is UTF-8 and Line endings is LF, the setting Git, Obsidian and static site generators prefer.
3
Convert and move them in
Press Convert to MD, then drop the .md files into your vault, repository or docs folder.

Answer

How do I turn a .txt file into a .md file?

Upload it and press Convert to MD. Paragraphs, lists and headings you already typed carry over, the file is saved as UTF-8 with LF line endings, and the extension becomes .md.

Why a TXT file is almost Markdown already

Markdown was designed in 2004 to look like the way people already wrote email: blank lines between paragraphs, dashes for bullet points, asterisks around a word for emphasis. That is why a careful .txt note often needs no changes at all to render well. The conversion is mostly about the file around the text: the extension, the character encoding and the line endings.

Those details decide whether things work. Obsidian only indexes files ending in .md, static site generators such as Hugo and Jekyll do not build pages from .txt files, and a repository full of CRLF line endings shows every line as changed in a diff. People hit this when they move a decade of Notepad notes into a vault, or turn a folder of text instructions into a docs site. When a note later has to reach someone who works in Word, Markdown to DOCX takes it the rest of the way.

Plain-text habits Markdown reads as formatting

Patterns from ordinary text files and what a Markdown renderer does with them
In your .txt	Rendered as	What to check
`# 3 items left`	A level-one heading	Lines that start with a hash sign
Text with `====` under it	A heading (setext style)	Underlines drawn with = or -
`1986. A good year.`	An ordered list	Years or numbers opening a line
`important`	Italic text	Asterisks used as emphasis or footnote marks
Four leading spaces	A code block	Indented quotes and addresses
`> quoted line`	A blockquote	Quoted replies from old emails

What a converted .md note looks like

Meeting notes, converted from .txt

# Team sync, 14 March

Attendees: Ana, Raj, Lee

- Budget approved for Q2
- Launch moved to 6 May

Next steps are in the shared tracker.

TXT and Markdown format facts

TXT

Plain text

A TXT file contains only plain characters with no formatting, fonts, images or layout. Modern text files are usually encoded in UTF-8, which covers every language, though older files may use other encodings and show garbled characters. Plain text is tiny, never becomes obsolete and opens on every device, from phones to servers. It cannot hold bold text, tables or pictures, so structure must be expressed with spacing or simple markup.

Compression: –
Transparency: –
Animation: –
Introduced: –

TXT converter

MD

Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup syntax created by John Gruber in 2004. It uses plain-text symbols, such as # for headings, * for emphasis and - for lists, that stay readable as raw text and convert cleanly to HTML. It is the standard for README files, documentation, wikis, note apps and many static site generators. There are several dialects, such as CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown, which differ in details like tables. Any text editor can open .md files.

Compression: –
Transparency: –
Animation: –
Introduced: 2004 · John Gruber

MD converter

Plain text is converted to Markdown when loose notes are moving into a system that understands structure: an Obsidian or Logseq vault, a GitHub repository's docs folder, or a static site where every page is an .md file.

TXT to MD questions

Is renaming a .txt file to .md enough?

Any text is technically valid Markdown, so a renamed file will open. The trouble is what renders: an old Windows file may be in a legacy encoding, carry CRLF line endings into a Git repo, or contain lines that Markdown reads as headings and lists by accident. Converting fixes the encoding and line endings in one pass.

Why did a line starting with a year turn into a numbered list?

Markdown treats a number followed by a period at the start of a line as an ordered list item, so 1986. A good year. becomes item 1986. John Gruber's original syntax page gives the fix: put a backslash before the period, as in 1986\..

Will my hard-wrapped lines join into one paragraph?

In the rendered view, yes. Markdown treats a single line break inside a paragraph as a space and starts a new paragraph only after a blank line. Text wrapped at 72 or 80 characters, common in old email and README files, reflows into normal paragraphs, which is usually what you want.

Which line ending should I choose, LF or CRLF?

LF for anything going into Git, a static site generator, Obsidian or a Mac or Linux machine. CRLF only for an older Windows program that shows everything on one line otherwise; Notepad itself has understood LF since Windows 10 version 1809.

Which apps open the converted .md files?

Obsidian, Typora, VS Code, iA Writer and Joplin open them for editing, and GitHub, GitLab and most wikis render them in the browser. For a finished page outside those tools, TXT to HTML produces the HTML directly.

More conversions for Markdown and text
Markdown to DOCX	HTML to Markdown	DOCX to Markdown
PDF to Markdown	CSV to Markdown	TXT to HTML