Bold, italics, strikethrough, inline code, links, quotes and nested lists arrive in Word as the real thing: styles and runs you can keep editing, not look-alikes.
Style guide excerpt
Use bold for UI labels, italics for new terms and never rarely strike text out. Refer to files as config.yaml and link to the handbook.
Quotes get a left rule and an indent, and can hold bold too.
Line one ends with two spaces
so this is a soft break, not a new paragraph.
CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown are both understood, including task lists, strikethrough and autolinks.
Each inline style is drawn the way Word draws it. If something looks off, fix the Markdown before you download.
Select any bold word in Word and the Bold button is lit. Lists renumber when you insert an item.
Formatting in a .docx exists at two levels. Paragraph properties say what kind of block something is: a heading, a quote, a list item at a given level. Run properties say how a stretch of characters inside a paragraph is drawn: bold, italic, struck through, in a different font. A converter that gets this right produces a document Word can reason about, so that the Bold button lights up when you select a bold word, and pressing Enter at the end of a list item creates the next item. The table below shows the exact mapping MDtoDOCX uses.
| Markdown | Word construct | In the file |
|---|---|---|
**bold** or __bold__ | Bold run | <w:b/> on the run |
*italic* or _italic_ | Italic run | <w:i/> |
***both*** | Bold italic run | <w:b/><w:i/> |
~~strike~~ | Strikethrough run | <w:strike/> |
`code` | Character style Verbatim Char, Consolas, light shading | <w:rStyle w:val="VerbatimChar"/> |
[text](url) | Live hyperlink, Hyperlink character style | <w:hyperlink r:id> + relationship |
> quote | Paragraph style Quote with left rule and indent | <w:pStyle w:val="Quote"/> |
- item / 1. item | List Paragraph with real numbering, six levels | <w:numPr> pointing at numbering.xml |
- [x] task | List item with ☒ / ☐ glyph | Unicode ballot box characters |
two trailing spaces or \ | Line break inside the paragraph | <w:br/> |
--- | Horizontal rule as bottom border | <w:pBdr>; option to emit a page break instead |
<sup> / <sub> | Superscript / subscript run | <w:vertAlign> |
<u> and <mark> | Underline / yellow highlight | <w:u/>, <w:highlight/> |
Word users mark emphasis by pressing Ctrl+B, which writes a bold property directly on the run, so that is what we write too. Anything a Word user would pick from the Styles gallery, a heading, a quote, a list, is written as a style reference instead. This split matters when you later apply a Word template: the template can change what Quote or Heading 2 looks like across the whole document, while your bold words stay bold.
Markdown nests a list by indenting it under an item. In Word, each level of nesting is a level in a numbering definition, and MDtoDOCX writes a definition with six levels, alternating disc, circle and square bullets, or decimal, lower alpha and lower roman for ordered lists. A bulleted list inside a numbered one keeps its bullets, because the two lists point at different definitions. Ordered lists that start at 5 start at 5 in Word. When you add an item in Word, numbering updates automatically because it is real numbering and not typed digits.
Inline code uses a character style so you can retarget it in one place: change Verbatim Char to a different font and every code span follows. Links are hyperlink fields with the URL stored in the relationships part, so Ctrl+click opens them and the accessibility checker sees them as links. Bare URLs and email addresses are autolinked. Reference-style links written as [text][id] are resolved before conversion.
Backslash escapes such as \* print the literal character. Inline HTML for superscript, subscript, underline, highlight and line breaks is honoured because Markdown has no native syntax for them; other inline HTML is stripped rather than shown as tags. Emoji are kept as characters and render with Segoe UI Emoji on Windows and Apple Color Emoji on macOS. Everything on this page is free with no image or size limits beyond the 2 MB general cap. Tables have their own rules covered on Markdown to Word with tables, and images on Markdown to Word with images. If your document also contains math, see Markdown to Word with LaTeX.
| Format | MDtoDOCX | Pandoc | Copy from a Markdown preview |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bold, italic, strikethrough | Run properties | Run properties | Usually kept |
| Inline code | Verbatim Char style, retargetable | Verbatim Char style | Direct font, inconsistent shading |
| Nested lists | Real numbering, six levels | Real numbering | Often flattened or spaced with tabs |
| Task lists | Checkbox glyphs | Checkbox glyphs | Broken HTML inputs or dropped |
| Blockquote | Quote style | Block Text style | Indented normal text |
| Soft line break | Line break in paragraph | Line break | New paragraph or lost |
| Preview before download | Yes | No | n/a |
| Install | None | Pandoc | None |