ReaderMD
Safari Extension · macOS, iOS, iPadOS
Clip any Safari page to Markdown.
One purchase, every Apple device. Click the toolbar icon in Safari for Obsidian-ready Markdown with YAML frontmatter, on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. No accounts, no cloud.
Built for anyone who lives in Markdown—Obsidian, Logseq, Bear, or a folder of .md files.
Coming to the Mac App Store How it works
Why it matters
What ReaderMD does for you
-
One purchase, every device
Buy ReaderMD once on the Mac App Store and it works in Safari on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Universal Purchase, no extra accounts.
-
Dual-engine, pick-the-best
Defuddle and Mozilla Readability run in parallel. We score both results for quality and keep the better one—Defuddle wins on YouTube and Reddit, Readability wins on news and docs.
-
Ready for your notes and your AI
YAML frontmatter with title, author, date, URL, and smart description. Drop it straight into Obsidian, Logseq, or Bear—or paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor. Markdown is the format LLMs prefer.
-
Local-first by design
No accounts, no cloud processing, no tracking, no analytics. Your browsing data never leaves your device.
Screenshots
See ReaderMD in action
Features
Built for real workflows
- Universal Safari extension
- Runs as a Safari Web Extension on macOS 14+, iOS 17+, and iPadOS 17+. Install on one device, it’s available on all of them via iCloud.
- Two extractors, one answer
- Defuddle and Mozilla Readability run in parallel. A quality score (word count penalized by link density and paragraph fragmentation) picks the better result for every page.
- Multi-tier fallback chain
- If both engines choke, ReaderMD falls back through semantic selectors, paragraph collection, and selected-text extraction. You always get something usable.
- CJK-aware extraction
- Properly handles Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sites with language-aware word counting—same technique Safari Reader uses internally.
- Configurable frontmatter
- YAML, Simple, or None. Pick which fields to include: title, URL, date, author, description. Smart description filtering skips generic taglines like "YouTube" or "New York Times".
- Keyboard-first popover
- Command-C to copy, Command-S to save—right from the popover. No mouse round-trip.
- Filename templates + reveal in Finder
- Slug or date-slug filename formats. Pick a download folder once; after save, a one-click "Show in Finder" button reveals the file. (Mac only.)
- Lightweight Markdown cleanup
- A 10-rule post-processor normalizes whitespace, headings, CommonMark code blocks, and lists without bloating the output.
- Works on most sites
- News, blogs, documentation, and reference sites. When automatic extraction fails on an unusual layout, select text on the page and clip your selection as Markdown.
Before & after
The difference, at a glance
Without ReaderMD
- Copy-pasting from websites gives you messy formatting, broken links, and no metadata.
- Manual cleanup takes longer than reading the article.
- Cloud-based clippers require accounts and sync.
- Separate tools for desktop and mobile, or no mobile option at all.
With ReaderMD
- One click gives you clean Markdown with proper headings, links, lists, and YAML frontmatter.
- Ready to drop into your notes app in seconds.
- Fully local. Nothing leaves your device.
- One purchase works in Safari on Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
FAQ
Common questions
- Does one purchase really work on all my Apple devices?
- Yes. ReaderMD ships as a Safari Web Extension with Universal Purchase. Buy it once on the Mac App Store and it’s available in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac via iCloud—no separate downloads or sign-ins. Settings stay local per device.
- Does it work on all sites?
- It works on most article-style pages—news (CNN, NYT, The Verge), blogs (Medium, Substack, WordPress), documentation (Apple Developer, MDN), and reference (Wikipedia). When extraction fails on an unusual layout, select text on the page and click ReaderMD—your selection is captured as formatted Markdown.
- What about paywalled content?
- ReaderMD can only extract content that is visible in your browser. If you’re logged in and can see the article, ReaderMD can extract it. It cannot bypass paywalls.
- Does it work offline?
- The extension itself works without an internet connection, but you need a webpage loaded in Safari to extract from.
- Is my data uploaded anywhere?
- No. ReaderMD processes everything locally. No data is sent to any server.
- What is frontmatter?
- Frontmatter is structured metadata at the top of a Markdown file. ReaderMD can add YAML frontmatter with the article title, URL, date, author, and description—useful for organizing notes in apps like Obsidian.
- Can I use this with ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools?
- Yes—it’s one of the best ways to prep web content for LLMs. Markdown preserves structure (headings, lists, code blocks) without HTML noise, and the output is significantly more token-efficient than pasting raw page content. Clip with ⌘-C, then paste into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot, or any local model. ReaderMD itself doesn’t talk to any AI—it just gives you the cleanest possible text to hand over.