The reading-list workflow

Open /convert/url-to-markdown (this tool uses the same converter), paste the URL of a long-read article, click Convert, save the .md file to a sync folder (Dropbox, iCloud, Syncthing, Google Drive). The article is now available offline on every device — readable in any Markdown viewer (Obsidian, iA Writer, Marked, even plain Notepad), searchable across your archive, editable to add your own annotations.

Why Markdown beats HTML and PDF for this use case

Saved HTML carries inline styles that break when CSS is missing, JavaScript that 404s on dependencies, image references that point to deleted CDNs. Print-to-PDF preserves the visual layout but loses editability and weighs 100× more than the underlying text. Markdown is plain UTF-8 — the format browsers used to assume the web would be made of, before the layered abstractions arrived. It opens in 1995 software and 2050 software equally well.

Building an offline article library

One folder per topic, one Markdown file per article, YAML front matter with the source URL and fetch date. Drop into Obsidian or any folder-of-Markdown reader. After a few months you have a personal Pocket-replacement that doesn't depend on a SaaS staying alive — and unlike Pocket, you can grep across the whole library in milliseconds.