Plain text with lightweight formatting marks — and the one text format Filemorph can pull straight out of a PDF, a DOCX, or an Excel sheet.
Markdown is a lightweight markup format created in 2004 by John Gruber, designed so that formatting — headings, bold text, links, lists — could be written using ordinary punctuation marks like asterisks and pound signs, readable as plain text even before it's rendered. That simplicity made it the default writing format for README files, technical documentation, blog platforms, and note-taking apps, since a .md file needs no special software to open or edit, unlike a DOCX or an RTF file with its own formatting structure baked in. Markdown's real strength on a phone shows up in how many other formats Filemorph can turn into it: a PDF's text, a DOCX document, and even an Excel spreadsheet's rows can all be extracted directly into a Markdown file, which is a more useful destination than plain text alone since it preserves headings and table structure rather than discarding them. From there, Markdown converts cleanly into HTML for a webpage or PDF for something to print, rounding out its role as a kind of universal middle format between documents, data, and the web.
iPhone, iPad, and Mac open Markdown files as plain text in Files, and any code editor or dedicated Markdown app renders the formatting properly. Because it is plain text at its core, literally any text editor on any platform can open a .md file, even without rendering the formatting.
Markdown reads clearly as plain text, but eventually it needs to become a webpage, a printable document, or a full DOCX file to actually be published or shared. Filemorph converts Markdown in either direction on-device, including pulling it back out of a PDF, DOCX, or spreadsheet.
Filemorph can convert Markdown to PDF on-device — a formatted, printable document once a Markdown file is ready to be finished and shared.
Filemorph converts .md files entirely on-device on iPhone, iPad and Mac — no upload, no account, and it works in Airplane Mode.
Relevant operations in Filemorph:
Markdown formats text using plain punctuation — asterisks for bold, pound signs for headings — so a file stays readable even unrendered, works in any text editor, and tracks cleanly in version control, none of which is true of a DOCX file's internal formatting structure.
Yes. Filemorph extracts a PDF's text directly into Markdown on the iPhone, preserving headings and structure better than a plain text export would, and it does the same for DOCX documents and Excel spreadsheet tables.
Yes. Filemorph converts to and from Markdown entirely on-device — a document's text is never uploaded to a server to extract or format it, and the conversion works with no internet connection.