Lists that will not become Markdown

Applies to Micro-Formatter 1.0.1 and later · Last updated 8 November 2026

What you are seeing

• Every item ends up on one line, with the bullet characters left in the middle of the text.
• The list renders, but each item keeps an extra gap or a stray tab.
• Markdown shows • item instead of turning it into a list.

Why it happens

There are two different things called "bulleted list". A word processor stores list structure as paragraph properties — you cannot see it, and it does not survive a paste into plain text. What does survive is a literal •, or a hard-wrapped line that begins with a hyphen and no space after it, which Markdown reads as an ordinary hyphen.

A Markdown list needs the marker at the start of a line, one space after it, and a blank line above and below the block.

Fix it by hand

• Put each item on its own line.
• Start each line with - — a hyphen and exactly one space.
• Leave a blank line before the first item and after the last.
• Replace tabs with spaces; a tab before an item is what turns it into a code block in some renderers.

Fix it with the extension

• Bullets → Markdown turns a leading -, * or + into - .
• Bullets → Numbers renumbers items from 1, in order, and it does accept the literal • character.
• Numbers → Bullets and Markdown → Bullets go the other way.
• Normalize spaces flattens the whole text to a single line — useful for one paragraph, wrong for a list.

What it will not do

The conversion rewrites line prefixes only. Nested indentation is dropped by Bullets → Markdown, because the marker is moved to the start of the line; if you need nesting, re-indent the child items afterwards with two spaces. It also cannot tell a list inside a code block from a real list, so convert one block at a time.

There is no one-click path from a literal • to a Markdown - list. Bullets → Numbers recognises the character and gives you a numbered list instead; if you specifically need hyphens, replace the bullets in a text editor first.