What gets normalised
| Before | After |
|---|---|
*, +, - mixed bullets | - everywhere (alternating in adjacent lists) |
__bold__, *italic* | **bold**, _italic_ |
Underlined === headings | # ATX headings |
1) numbering | 1. numbering |
| Ragged tables | Padded columns that respect alignment colons |
| Missing or extra blank lines | One blank line between blocks |
| Unlabelled fences | Kept as they are (no language is guessed) |
Why format Markdown?
Markdown renders the same whether you use * or -, but mixed styles make diffs noisy and documents harder to maintain. Teams usually settle on one style with a linter such as markdownlint and a formatter such as Prettier in their editor or pre-commit hook. This page gives you the same result without setting anything up.
Table of contents
The generated TOC links to each heading with GitHub-compatible anchors, so it works on GitHub, GitLab and most static site generators. It sits between <!-- toc --> and <!-- tocstop --> comments (the same markers the popular markdown-toc tool uses), so running the formatter again replaces it instead of adding a second one.