What happens when you paste
When you copy from Google Docs, Word or a web page, the clipboard holds two versions: plain text and HTML. This tool reads the HTML version, cleans it, and converts it to GitHub Flavored Markdown. If there’s no HTML, it takes the plain text, escapes characters that Markdown would treat as formatting, and keeps your paragraphs.
The cleanup, by source
Each app writes its own kind of HTML. We recognize the source from its markup (a heuristic, shown under the result) and clean it before converting:
- Google Docs. Docs wraps the whole paste in a
<b>tag withfont-weight:normal. Converted naively, your entire document would be bold, so that wrapper is removed. Real formatting comes from inline styles: bold weights become**bold**, italic becomes*italic*, line-through becomes~~strikethrough~~and monospace fonts become code. Headings arrive as real h1 to h6 tags and stay headings. - Microsoft Word. Word adds Office-only markup: conditional comments,
<o:p>tags,mso-styles and its own list numbering. That markup is removed. Word lists are paragraphs with a list style rather than real lists, so we rebuild them, using the indent level for nesting and the original bullet or number to choose between bulleted and numbered. Check long or unusual lists; this part is best-effort. - Notion and web pages. Data attributes and empty wrapper spans are removed, and the rest converts like any HTML: links, lists, tables, quotes and code blocks.
Tables and strikethrough are GFM extensions to CommonMark, so they render on GitHub and in most MDX blogs and docs tools. Markdown has no underline or text color, so those are dropped.
Next steps
Paste the result into your repo or CMS, then check the length with the word counter or the reading time calculator. If you have raw HTML rather than a document, use HTML to Markdown, which also resolves relative links. For spreadsheets, CSV to Markdown is more precise than pasting a table.