Sharing Markdown

I created two HTML tools for viewing markdown.

The first is the Markdown Viewer: it lets you paste a Markdown document and view it in rendered form for easy reading. It supports basic Markdown and some extensions, such as highlighting, superscripts and subscripts, syntax highlighting, and rendering of PlantUML diagrams.

The second is the Markdown Slide Viewer. It interprets a Markdown document as a series of slides by splitting it at level 1 headings. The heading text becomes the slide title. It has similar features to the Markdown Viewer, plus some extras specific to slide presentations, such as keyboard navigation, transitions, and drawing on slides.

But the common feature that I like best about both applications is their sharing ability. When you paste a Markdown document, you can press the Copy link button. This creates a link to the application with the complete current document encoded in a query parameter and copies it to the clipboard. You can send someone the link, and when they click it the application decodes the parameter value and loads the document again.

This is an ideal way to quickly share a Markdown document with someone, who will receive it in an easy-to-read form: as a document or as a presentation.

Being HTML tools, there is no server-side component (except loading the initial viewer page), and all en/decoding and rendering happens locally in the browsers of sender and receiver. Security could even be improved by adding the option to encrypt the query parameter value.