Markdown: Basics

* Main * Basics * Syntax * License * Dingus

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.

[s]: /projects/markdown/syntax \"Markdown Syntax\" [d]: /projects/markdown/dingus \"Markdown Dingus\"

Paragraphs, Headers, Blockquotes

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 spaces or tabs.

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 HTML header level.