Markdown to LaTeX Converter

Q: Why are underscores escaped?

An unescaped _ starts a subscript in LaTeX and breaks compilation outside math mode, so it becomes \_.

Markdown to LaTeX cheat sheet

Markdown	LaTeX
`# Title`	`\section{Title}`
`## Sub`	`\subsection{Sub}`
`bold`	`\textbf{bold}`
`italic`	`\emph{italic}`
`- item`	`\begin{itemize} \item …`
`[text](url)`	`\href{url}{text}`
```py	`\begin{lstlisting}[language=py]`
`table`	`\begin{tabular}{l c r}`

Fragment or full document

The full document option wraps the output in an article preamble that loads hyperref, graphicx, listings, ulem (for strikethrough) and amsmath, so it compiles as-is in Overleaf or with pdflatex. Turn it off to paste into an existing paper.

Special characters

LaTeX reserves # $ % & _ { } ~ ^ \. They are escaped in text automatically (for example 50% becomes 50\%), so the output compiles without “Missing $ inserted” errors.

Math

Markdown math written as $…$ is kept as text here. For heavy math documents Pandoc (pandoc in.md -o out.tex) passes math through natively. To preview Markdown math, see the math guide.

Other formats

Markdown converts to: Confluence, Jira, Slack, BBCode, MediaWiki, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, plus HTML, PDF, Word and Excel.

Questions people ask

Can I compile the output directly?

Yes, with “Full document” on. Paste it into a new Overleaf project or run pdflatex file.tex.

Why are underscores escaped?

An unescaped _ starts a subscript in LaTeX and breaks compilation outside math mode, so it becomes \_.

Is this as complete as Pandoc?

It covers common document elements. Pandoc handles citations, math and custom templates; use it for theses and books.