Writing Rich WYSIWYG Notes With Tables, Images and Code in Unreal Engine

The problem with documenting Blueprints

If you have ever tried to keep design notes next to your Blueprints, you already know the friction. Comment bubbles get clipped, do not survive refactors well, and cannot hold a table or an annotated screenshot. So most teams alt-tab to Notion, Confluence or Obsidian, and the documentation drifts away from the asset it describes until nobody trusts it any more.

What you actually want is Unreal Engine in-editor notes with Markdown WYSIWYG editing: a rich-text surface that lives inside the editor, attaches to a specific Blueprint, and saves alongside your project in source control. Markdown 4 Blueprints does exactly this. It is an editor-only documentation tool that adds a documentation tab where you write headings, bold text, tables, images, code blocks and links, all visually, and it writes the result to a plain .md file under your project.

This guide walks through the parts most people fight with in a documentation tool: building tables, inserting and resizing images, and dropping in code blocks, all without typing a single pipe character or backtick. Before we start, one important clarification so you set the right expectations.

What this tool is, and is not

Markdown 4 Blueprints is an editor-only authoring tool. It runs in the Unreal Editor, renders its WYSIWYG surface through the engine's built-in WebBrowserWidget plugin, and saves your notes as Markdown files inside the project under Documentation/Blueprints/, mirroring your asset hierarchy. Per-asset notes land at Documentation/Blueprints/{AssetPath}.md, and standalone notes live under Documentation/Blueprints/Standalone/.

It is not a runtime UMG widget. It does not render Markdown into your shipping game UI such as quest logs or in-game patch notes. Think of it as a documentation desk built into the editor, not a renderer you ship to players. It is fully offline with no external libraries, has a native dark theme that matches the editor, and auto-saves roughly 500 milliseconds after you stop typing.

Install it into your project's Plugins folder, enable 'Blueprint Markdown Documentation' under Edit then Plugins, and restart the editor. The shipped plugin targets Windows 64-bit and is live-packaged for Unreal Engine 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7, and it ships full C++ source.

WYSIWYG versus raw Markdown

The whole point of a WYSIWYG editor is that you see formatted output as you type rather than a wall of asterisks and pipes. With Markdown 4 Blueprints you get live preview for headings, bold, italic, code blocks, tables, images and links, and you never have to learn or remember Markdown syntax. The file on disk is still clean, portable Markdown, so it diffs nicely in source control and reads fine in any other Markdown viewer, but your authoring experience is purely visual.

Open the editor via Window then Blueprint Documentation, or from the button the plugin adds to the Level Editor toolbar and the Blueprint Editor toolbar. With a Blueprint open, the tool auto-detects the active asset and loads the matching note, switching content as you switch Blueprints. Click 'New Note' to start documentation for the focused asset, or create a standalone note with no asset focused.

From here on, formatting is driven by toolbar controls and keyboard shortcuts. The text shortcuts you will use constantly are Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+I for italic and Ctrl+U for underline. Because auto-save fires shortly after you stop typing, there is no save button ritual to remember; just write.

Building a table with the toolbar editor

Tables are where raw Markdown is most painful, with its fragile pipes and dashes that have to line up. Markdown 4 Blueprints replaces all of that with a visual table editor driven by toolbar controls, so you build and edit tables structurally rather than as text.

1. Place your cursor where you want the table to appear in the note.

2. Use the toolbar table control to insert a table, choosing the initial number of rows and columns.

3. Click into any cell and type its content directly; the cell renders as you go, no pipe characters required.

4. Use the toolbar controls to add or remove rows and columns as your content grows, rather than hand-editing Markdown syntax.

Because the result is saved as standard Markdown, the table remains readable and editable outside the tool, but you never have to manually align a single delimiter. This is ideal for things like input mappings, state tables, tuning values, or a quick comparison of two approaches you are weighing up for a system.

Inserting and resizing images

Screenshots make Blueprint documentation far more useful, and Markdown 4 Blueprints supports images through a native file picker with inline resize. That means you can annotate a graph, capture a node setup, or paste in a reference diagram and size it sensibly within the note.

1. Position your cursor where the image should sit.

2. Trigger image insertion from the toolbar, which opens the native file picker.

3. Select the image file you want to embed.

4. Once placed, resize the image inline so it fits the flow of your note rather than dominating the page.

Keep images alongside your project so they travel with the documentation. When you hand the project off, the visuals go with it, which is exactly what you want for an annotated sample project or a systems handover.

Code blocks, shortcuts and exporting

Technical notes almost always need code or pseudo-code, and the editor supports code blocks alongside inline formatting. Use a code block when you want to capture a console command, a snippet of C++, or a sequence of node names that should read as a monospaced unit rather than prose. Combined with headings to structure the document and the Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+U shortcuts for inline emphasis, you have everything you need for clear, scannable engineering notes.

The sidebar helps you keep large documentation sets navigable. There is an expand-all-folders toggle for the tree, an optional setting to auto-open the associated Blueprint when you select a note, and a delete-note action guarded by a confirmation dialog so you do not lose work by accident. You can configure where notes are stored via Project Settings, under the Blueprint Markdown developer settings, which is handy if you want documentation to live somewhere specific in your repository layout.

When it is time to share, use 'Export Notes' for a one-click dump of everything into an external '{ProjectName} Documentation' folder that preserves the original file structure. That gives you a clean documentation bundle for handoff or archival without manually copying files around. Because every note is plain Markdown committed next to your assets, your documentation finally lives where the work does, and stays there.

WYSIWYG editing versus hand-writing raw Markdown

How the in-editor visual workflow compares with editing Markdown by hand.

FAQ