md2linkedin

md2linkedin converts Markdown text to LinkedIn-compatible plain text by replacing bold, italic, and bold-italic markers with Unicode Mathematical Sans-Serif characters. This preserves visual formatting when pasting into platforms like LinkedIn that do not support Markdown natively.

Installation

Tip: Run the CLI without installing it with uvx md2linkedin post.md.

Usage

Python API

# @pyodide
from md2linkedin import convert

md = """
# Exciting News

I'm thrilled to share that **we just launched** a new product!

Key highlights:

- **Performance**: *3x faster* than the previous version
- **Reliability**: ***zero downtime*** deployments
- **Developer UX**: clean, intuitive API

Check it out and let me know what you think.
"""

print(convert(md))

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
𝗘𝗫𝗖𝗜𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗡𝗘𝗪𝗦
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

I'm thrilled to share that 𝘄𝗲 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱 a new product!

Key highlights:

• 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲: 3𝘹 𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 than the previous version
• 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆: 𝙯𝙚𝙧𝙤 𝙙𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚 deployments
• 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗨𝗫: clean, intuitive API

Check it out and let me know what you think.

CLI

# Convert a Markdown file (output: post.linkedin.txt)
md2linkedin post.md

# Specify output path
md2linkedin post.md -o linkedin_post.txt

# Pipe from stdin
echo "**Hello**, *world*!" | md2linkedin

# Keep link URLs in the output
md2linkedin post.md --preserve-links

# Disable monospace code rendering
md2linkedin post.md --no-monospace-code

Key Features

• Bold: **text** or __text__ → Unicode Sans-Serif Bold (𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱)
• Italic: *text* or _text_ → Unicode Sans-Serif Italic (𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤)
• Bold-italic: ***text*** or ___text___ → Unicode Sans-Serif Bold Italic (𝙗𝙤𝙡𝙙-𝙞𝙩𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙘)
• Headers: #/##/etc. styled with bold Unicode; H1 gets a ━ border
• Code spans: backticks stripped, content rendered in Unicode Monospace (𝚌𝚘𝚍𝚎) by default; --no-monospace-code keeps plain text
• Fenced code blocks: fences stripped and content rendered in Unicode Monospace by default; --no-monospace-code preserves verbatim
• Links: stripped to display text by default; --preserve-links retains URLs
• Images: replaced by alt text
• Bullet lists: -/*/+ → •; nested items get one marker per level (‣, ◦, ▪)
• Blockquotes: leading > stripped
• HTML spans: unwrapped, inner text preserved
• HTML entities: decoded (& → &, etc.)
• Backslash escapes: resolved (\* → *)
• Windows line endings: normalised automatically
• Emojis & non-ASCII: pass through unchanged — no accidental corruption

Limitations

Converting Markdown to LinkedIn-friendly text relies on Unicode Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols to simulate styling. This approach has notable limitations:

• Code Blocks: Monospace Unicode characters do not enforce true fixed-width alignment on proportional fonts (like LinkedIn’s default font). As a result, indentation and column alignment in code blocks will often break visually.
• Tables: Markdown tables are not converted — they pass through as raw pipe syntax (| col | col |), which LinkedIn does not render, producing unreadable output.
• Accessibility: Screen readers often read Unicode mathematical characters aloud individually (e.g., “mathematical sans-serif bold b”) instead of as complete words, making the content difficult for visually impaired users to understand.
• Searchability: Text styled with these Unicode characters may not be indexed properly by LinkedIn’s search algorithm, meaning people searching for your keywords might not find your post.
• Markdown parsing: The converter is a pipeline of regular expressions, not a CommonMark parser. Ordinary posts convert faithfully, but constructs whose meaning depends on their surroundings — indented code blocks, nested blockquotes, link reference definitions, a thematic break indented inside a list item — are read more loosely than a real parser would read them. See Markdown parsing fidelity for the specifics.

For more examples, check out the package documentation at: https://www.indrapatil.com/md2linkedin/

See Also

• md2linkedin Web App — an interactive web interface for md2linkedin, built by Yann Cohen.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the md2linkedin project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

Acknowledgements

Hex sticker font is Rubik. Icons are sourced from Flaticon:

• Markdown icon by Freepik
• LinkedIn icon by Freepik
• Arrow/conversion icon by Freepik