Markdown: Basics

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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 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 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.