Commenting on and viewing formatted markdown in Pull Request

[ckumick-va]

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We are increasing our use of Markdown files, but the Pull Request files view shows the raw Markdown text. Reviewers would find it easier to review Markdown if they could see and comment on the diff of the formatted Markdown inside the Pull Request without leaving to View File mode. The raw Markdown diff is still valuable, so we should not lose that.

Current Markdown Diff:

Proposed Markdown Rendered Diff:

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[Tamanna-Sharma8]

This would indeed improve the PR review experience, especially as more teams adopt Markdown for documentation and design discussions.

A rendered Markdown diff alongside the raw diff would allow reviewers to evaluate formatting, structure, and readability changes directly within the PR, without repeatedly switching to file view. At the same time, keeping the raw Markdown diff available is important for reviewing precise content edits.

A possible improvement could be:

• Toggle between Raw Markdown Diff and Rendered Markdown Diff.
• Inline comments mapped to the rendered view while still referencing the underlying source lines.
• Support for common Markdown extensions used in documentation workflows.

This would make documentation reviews much smoother while preserving existing diff workflows for technical reviewers.

[FrankLedo]

Our team uses PRs to review technical design documents (IDFs, impact analyses, architecture plans) stored as markdown. The rich diff toggle exists, which is great for seeing what changed — but we can't leave inline comments on the rendered view. We have to mentally map rendered content back to raw diff lines to comment.

For documentation-heavy PRs where the content matters more than the code, being able to read and comment on the rendered markdown directly would make PR-based document review as effective as Confluence or Google Docs, but with the full PR workflow (approvals, CI, history).

Our specific workflow: engineers write design docs as .md files, open a draft PR, and share the PR link for review. Reviewers use the rich diff to read the formatted document, but when they want to comment on a specific section they have to switch back to the raw diff, find the right lines, and comment there. This friction pushes teams back to Confluence/Google Docs, which loses the benefits of version control and code review workflows.

The ask: allow inline comments on the rendered (rich diff) markdown view, mapped back to the underlying source lines.