The poor man’s Confluence to Markdown converter

16 September 2025

In short: You can use DevTools to copy the HTML of a Confluence article and paste it into an HTML-MD converter.

Note that if you have time and freedom to install some command line software, Pandoc is very good at this kind of thing. The following is a quick and lazy alternative.

You can apply this to almost anything on your system that appears like rich text (with headings, bullets, etc.) like a Word doc.

1. Make a new file with this content: <div contenteditable>. Save it as editor.htm.
2. Open your Confluence article (in View mode, not Edit)
3. Copy all the text of the article
4. Open editor.htm in your browser, and paste your page content into the editable div
5. Open DevTools (F12) or Inspect Element (Ctrl+Shift+C) and select any part of the page (see image)
6. In the Elements inspector, right click the <div> node and select Copy → Copy outerHTML (or similar)
7. Paste into an HTML to MD tool such as markdownlang or htmlmd or codebeautify (N.b. I don’t endorse any of these or their data security - exercise caution!)
8. Receive Markdown!

You may then want to lightly edit the markdown to put it in your own style.

I checked and this method worked with headings, bullets, and inline code. I didn’t test it on code blocks, quotes, or tables.

Steps 1-4 aren’t strictly necessary for Confluence - you could just use the DevTools on the original page to copy the outerHTML of the <div class="ak-renderer-document"> node. However, this method will let you take the content of a Word doc (or any other copyable rich text) and turn it into HTML.

Steps 5-8 help you turn that HTML into Markdown. 📃🪓