Three ways in
Paste rich text is for documents. Copy from Google Docs, Word or a web page and paste into the paste area: the tool reads the formatted (HTML) version of what you copied straight from the clipboard. The pasted content is never inserted into the page — it is parsed as an inert document, so scripts in it cannot run and images are not loaded. This is how to convert a Google Doc to Markdown without exporting it first.
HTML source takes markup you paste as text, such as a saved page or a CMS export. Plain text is for when you want to convert text to Markdown: blank lines separate paragraphs, lines that start with •, -, * or a number such as 1. become list items, and characters that Markdown would misread are escaped. Plain text carries no bold or headings, so there is nothing more to detect.
What is converted
- Headings h1–h6 as # to ######, paragraphs, and line breaks as a backslash hard break.
- Bold, italic and strikethrough — including Google Docs’ styled spans (font-weight 700, italic, line-through).
- Links with their titles, bare URLs as autolinks, and images with alt text.
- Bulleted and numbered lists, nested to any depth, with start numbers and task-list checkboxes.
- Inline code and code blocks, fenced with backticks and labelled with the language from a language- class.
- Block quotes, horizontal rules, and tables as GFM pipe tables with column alignment.
Google Docs and Word quirks
Google Docs wraps a whole paste in a <b> element styled as normal weight; the converter recognises it, so your document does not come out all bold. Docs marks bold and italic with styles on <span> elements rather than tags, and those are read too. Word writes its lists as paragraphs with a hidden bullet or number in front; they are rebuilt as real nested Markdown lists.
What is left out
Markdown has no colours, fonts, underline or merged table cells, so those are dropped (a cell spanning columns is padded with empty cells). Scripts, styles, frames, forms and media players are removed. Links to javascript: addresses become plain text. Images stored inside the HTML as data, or pointing to temporary files on your computer as Word’s do, are left out with a note, because a Markdown file cannot link to them.