Not every author drafts in Word. Plenty write in Obsidian, iA Writer, Bear, or Ulysses because Markdown gets out of the way. Others build their book from a static site — Hugo, Jekyll, Ghost — or just write clean HTML by hand. If that's you, the usual advice to "format it in Word first" is annoying at best and a good way to introduce new errors at worst. The real question is simpler: can you import a Markdown or HTML manuscript into Pendrilo without starting over? Yes — here's exactly what happens when you do.
What Pendrilo Actually Imports
Pendrilo accepts .docx, .txt, .md, and .html files on import, so Markdown and HTML sit alongside Word as first-class starting points, not an afterthought. When you import, headings become chapter or section breaks, paragraph text carries over, and basic inline formatting like bold and italics comes through as you'd expect.
What doesn't survive the trip, regardless of source format, is worth knowing upfront: images, tables, footnotes, text boxes, comments, and hyperlink URLs are all stripped out during import. This isn't a Markdown-specific quirk — it's true of .docx imports too. The import is built to get your prose and structure in cleanly, not to replicate every element of a source document. Anything visual or interactive gets rebuilt on the Pendrilo side using its own tools once your text is in.
Why Markdown Imports Cleanly (Mostly)
Markdown has an advantage that a messy Word file often doesn't: it's plain text. There's no hidden style inheritance, no leftover tracked-changes cruft, no mystery formatting from three different collaborators pasting into the same doc. A `# Chapter One` heading is a heading. A `**word**` is bold. That predictability usually means fewer surprises after import than you'd get from a decade-old .docx with inconsistent paragraph styles.
A few things worth checking before you import
- Footnote syntax varies. Obsidian, MultiMarkdown, and Pandoc all handle footnotes slightly differently, and none of those syntaxes translate automatically into Pendrilo's footnote tool. Plan to re-add footnotes manually after import using the editor's built-in footnote formatting rather than expecting the markup to convert.
- Images are referenced, not embedded. A Markdown image tag points to a file path that won't mean anything once it's inside a different app. Pull your image list out separately before you import so you're not hunting for files later.
- Horizontal rules as scene breaks. If you've been using `---` to mark scene breaks, check how each one lands after import. Pendrilo has its own scene-break and dinkus options per chapter, so it's usually faster to standardize on those after the fact than to fight the conversion.
HTML From Static Site Generators and Web Drafts
A growing number of authors write serialized fiction or nonfiction on a blog or static site before pulling it together into a book. If that's your workflow, importing the HTML is far less painful than copy-pasting from a browser into a word processor, which tends to drag in inline styles you didn't ask for.
A straight HTML import pulls text and structural tags — headings, paragraphs, emphasis — but it doesn't bring your site's stylesheet, theme, or layout with it, and it shouldn't. You want your manuscript's look controlled by Pendrilo's formatting themes, not by whatever CSS your blog happened to have. The same limitations apply here as with Markdown and Word: no images, no tables, and no hyperlink URLs. If your posts link out to sources, research, or other chapters, export that list of links before you import so you're not reconstructing it from memory.
A Practical Workflow for Bringing In a Markdown Draft
If you're moving a full manuscript over, a little prep before the import saves cleanup after it:
- Make sure each chapter starts with a consistent heading level (all `#` or all `##`, not a mix) so the import splits chapters where you expect.
- Search your file for footnote markers and jot down what needs to be re-added manually — you'll thank yourself later.
- Pull images into a separate folder with clear filenames so you can re-insert them chapter by chapter once the text is in.
- Import the file, then use the chapter sidebar to split, merge, or reorder anything that landed slightly off — this is normal with any format conversion, not a sign something went wrong.
- Apply a formatting theme and check the live device previews before you sink time into per-chapter tweaks.
Once your text is in, it's worth running a quick sanity check on length using the free words-to-pages estimator at Pendrilo's tools page — useful for catching a manuscript that imported shorter than expected because a section got dropped, or just for setting expectations on trim size before you start formatting in earnest.
When It's Worth Just Trying It
The lowest-risk way to answer "will my file import cleanly?" is to actually try it. Try importing a short sample during Pendrilo's seven-day trial. The trial includes one book and 3,000 cumulative manuscript words; imported words count toward that allowance. Active trial access includes supported publishing exports. After access expires, you can still read your writing and download basic manuscript backups. If the structure comes through the way you'd hope, the rest of the work is formatting and polish, not retyping a manuscript you already spent months writing somewhere else.
Drafting outside Word was never the obstacle it's sometimes made out to be. The obstacle is usually not knowing what a given tool will and won't preserve. Now you do.
