<li><a href="/projects/markdown/" title="Markdown Project Page">Main</a></li>
<li><a class="selected" title="Markdown Basics">Basics</a></li>
<li><a href="/projects/markdown/syntax" title="Markdown Syntax Documentation">Syntax</a></li>
<li><a href="/projects/markdown/license" title="Pricing and License Information">License</a></li>
<li><a href="/projects/markdown/dingus" title="Online Markdown Web Form">Dingus</a></li>
Getting the Gist of Markdown's Formatting Syntax
------------------------------------------------
This page offers a brief overview of what it's like to use Markdown.
The [syntax page] [s] provides complete, detailed documentation for
every feature, but Markdown should be very easy to pick up simply by
looking at a few examples of it in action. The examples on this page
are written in a before/after style, showing example syntax and the
HTML output produced by Markdown.
It's also helpful to simply try Markdown out; the [Dingus] [d] is a
web application that allows you type your own Markdown-formatted text
and translate it to XHTML.
**Note:** This document is itself written using Markdown; you
can [see the source for it by adding '.text' to the URL] [src].
[s]: /projects/markdown/syntax "Markdown Syntax"
[d]: /projects/markdown/dingus "Markdown Dingus"
[src]: /projects/markdown/basics.text
A paragraph is simply one or more consecutive lines of text, separated
by one or more blank lines. (A blank line is any line that looks like
a blank line -- a line containing nothing but spaces or tabs is
considered blank.) Normal paragraphs should not be indented with
Markdown offers two styles of headers: *Setext* and *atx*.
Setext-style headers for and are created by
"underlining" with equal signs () and hyphens (), respectively.
To create an atx-style header, you put 1-6 hash marks () at the
beginning of the line -- the number of hashes equals the resulting
Blockquotes are indicated using email-style '' angle brackets.
Markdown uses asterisks and underscores to indicate spans of emphasis.
Unordered (bulleted) lists use asterisks, pluses, and hyphens (,
, and ) as list markers. These three markers are
all produce the same output:
Ordered (numbered) lists use regular numbers, followed by periods, as
If you put blank lines between items, you'll get tags for the
list item text. You can create multi-paragraph list items by indenting
the paragraphs by 4 spaces or 1 tab:
Markdown supports two styles for creating links: *inline* and
*reference*. With both styles, you use square brackets to delimit the
text you want to turn into a link.
Inline-style links use parentheses immediately after the link text.
Optionally, you may include a title attribute in the parentheses:
Reference-style links allow you to refer to your links by names, which
you define elsewhere in your document:
The title attribute is optional. Link names may contain letters,
numbers and spaces, but are *not* case sensitive:
Image syntax is very much like link syntax.
Inline (titles are optional):
Both of the above examples produce the same output:
In a regular paragraph, you can create code span by wrapping text in
backtick quotes. Any ampersands () and angle brackets ( or
) will automatically be translated into HTML entities. This makes
it easy to use Markdown to write about HTML example code:
To specify an entire block of pre-formatted code, indent every line of
the block by 4 spaces or 1 tab. Just like with code spans, , ,
and characters will be escaped automatically.
